Attentional Control
Attentional control is the ability to hold focus on the information that matters and keep everything else out. It is not memory and it is not intelligence, though it is easily mistaken for both. The construct is well established and has no single originator. What is not established is the headline claim most often hung on it, that heavy media multitaskers have worse attentional control, which two close replications failed to reproduce.
What it is
The cleanest demonstration of what the construct is comes from memory competition. On a working memory task, competitors hold about seven items where a typical student holds around two, and the difference lies in attention rather than in memory itself. They are better at keeping interference out, not at storing more.
That case is worth stating carefully, because a popular account of it reverses the arrow. Reading the competitors' advantage as memory training producing attentional control is the inverse of what was observed.
The construct's most cited empirical test is Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass and Anthony Wagner's 2009 paper, which screened 262 participants and compared heavy and light media multitaskers on filtering, working memory and task switching. The heavy group did worse at filtering irrelevant information. The first author is Ophir, then a graduate student, and the vault's standing rule is to credit him rather than the better-known second author.