Part one of term paper
Kahneman and Treisman (1984, p.55) have succinctly described the main disagreement between early selection and late selection theories of attention: 'The classic question of attention theory has always been whether attention controls the build-up of perceptual information, or merely selects among the responses associated with currently active ...

Part two of term paper
... briefly examines and discusses the main findings and criticisms that have caused the transition from early selection models to late selection models of attention. Apart from these two extreme positions, theories that combine aspects of both theories are also discussed. The essential question which, if answered, would provide evidence on whether stimuli are semantically processed before or after selection is what people know about the unattended information. If the subject does not know the meaning ...