 The chief rivals of Broadbent’s early selection theory were the ‘late selectionists’, who claimed that all (or almost all) perceivable properties are detected automatically, by a large capacity system that operates on all of the stimuli with which the perceiving subject is presented. According to this late selection theory of attention the consequences of passing through the bottleneck of attention into the post-attentive small capacity system are only (1) that the subject comes to be conscious of the contents that the large capacity system has already succeeded in encoding and (2) that those contents come to be stored in working memory (Deutsch and Deutsch, 1963).