 The view that the function of attention is the management of limitations in the brain’s information processing capacity has been an orthodox one among psychologists since Donald Broadbent introduced it in the nineteen fifties, but it has sometimes been called into question. The theories of attention proposed by philosophers have tended not to endorse any straightforward version of the capacity-limitation view, and there are empirical reasons to think that the simplest versions of such a view are mistaken. In the nineteen seventies Ulric Neisser and his collaborators carried out a series of experiments showing that, when appropriately trained, a subject can perform two attention-involving tasks concurrently, without much interference between them (Hirst et al., 1980, Neisser, 1976). Neisser interpreted these experiments as suggesting that, insofar as there is a bottleneck that attention is needed to manage, it must often be a bottleneck in behavioural coordination, rather than in information processing capacity. Simple bodily limitations are what prevent us from looking in two directions at one time, or from throwing a ball and writing with the same hand. Neisser’s suggestion was that in many cases cognitive processing was selective, not as a result of limitations in processing capacity, but only in so far as such bodily limitations required it to be.