The study found that the brain's attention focus starts with a broad category, then narrows down to the specific feature of interest. "This means that the brain's attention mechanisms are organized in a hierarchy such that it prepares for perceiving a stimulus by narrowing the focus of our attention over time." The research team measured how long it took the brain to get ready to pay attention to colored dots moving on the screen. "This broad focus of attention is then narrowed further to suppress the irrelevant colors as well, supporting processing of the specific color or motion of interest." Attention to the dot's specific feature—blue or green, or up and down—took longer, with an average time of 400 milliseconds.