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Beyond capacity: A functional view of attention

In H. Heuer & H. F. Sanders (eds.), Perspectives on Perception and Action. Lawerence Erlbaum (1987)

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  1. The Nature of Attention.Sebastian Watzl - 2011 - Philosophy Compass 6 (11):842-853.
    What is attention? Attention is often seen as a subject matter for the hard sciences of cognitive and brain processes, and is understood in terms of sub-personal mechanisms and processes. Correspondingly, there still is a stark contrast between the central role attention plays for the empirical investigation of the mind in psychology and the neurosciences, and its relative neglect in philosophy. Yet, over the past years, several philosophers have challenged the standard conception. A number of interesting philosophical questions concerning the (...)
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  • Attention as Selection for Action.Wayne Wu - 2011 - In Christopher Mole, Declan Smithies & Wayne Wu (eds.), Attention: Philosophical and Psychological Essays. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 97--116.
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  • Attention.Christopher Mole - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Passive frame theory: A new synthesis.Ezequiel Morsella, Godwin Christine, Jantz Tiffany, Krieger Stephen & Gazzaley Adam - forthcoming - Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
    Passive frame theory attempts to illuminate what consciousness is, in mechanistic and functional terms; it does not address the “implementation” level of analysis (how neurons instantiate conscious states), an enigma for various disciplines. However, in response to the commentaries, we discuss how our framework provides clues regarding this enigma. In the framework, consciousness is passive albeit essential. Without consciousness, there would not be adaptive skeletomotor action.
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  • Codes and their vicissitudes.Bernhard Hommel, Jochen Müsseler, Gisa Aschersleben & Wolfgang Prinz - 2001 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (5):910-926.
    First, we discuss issues raised with respect to the Theory of Event Coding (TEC)'s scope, that is, its limitations and possible extensions. Then, we address the issue of specificity, that is, the widespread concern that TEC is too unspecified and, therefore, too vague in a number of important respects. Finally, we elaborate on our views about TEC's relations to other important frameworks and approaches in the field like stages models, ecological approaches, and the two-visual-pathways model. Footnotes1 We acknowledge the precedence (...)
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  • An Agent of Attention: An Inquiry into the Source of Our Control.Aaron Henry - 2019 - Dissertation, University of Toronto
    When performing a skilled action—whether something impressive like a double somersault or something mundane like reaching for a glass of water—you exercise control over your bodily movements. Specifically, you guide their course. In what does that control consist? In this dissertation, I argue that it consists in attending to what you are doing. More specifically, in attending, agents harness their perceptual and perceptuomotor states directly and practically in service of their goals and, in doing so, settle the fine-grained manner in (...)
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  • What is Attention? Adverbialist Theories.Christopher Mole & Aaron Henry - 2023 - WIREs Cognitive Science 14 (1).
    This article presents theories of attention that attempt to derive their answer to the question of what attention is from their answers to the question of what it is for some activity to be done attentively. Such theories provide a distinctive account of the difficulties that are faced by the attempt to locate processes in the brain by which the phenomena of attention can be explained. Their account does not share the pessimism of theories suggesting that the concept of attention (...)
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  • The Ethics of Attention: Engaging the Real with Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil.Silvia Caprioglio Panizza - 2022 - New York, NY, USA: Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory.
    This book draws on Iris Murdoch's philosophy to explore questions related to the importance of attention in ethics. In doing so, it also engages with Murdoch's ideas about the existence of a moral reality, the importance of love, and the necessity but also the difficulty, for most of us, of fighting against our natural self-centred tendencies. Why is attention important to morality? This book argues that many moral failures and moral achievements can be explained by attention. Not only our actions (...)
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  • Knowledge in motion: How procedural control of knowledge usage entails selectivity and bias.Ulrich Ansorge - 2021 - Journal of Knowledge Structures and Systems 2 (1):3-28.
    The use and acquisition of knowledge appears to be influenced by what humans pay attention to. Thus, looking at attention will tell us something about the mechanisms involved in knowledge (usage). According to the present review, attention reflects selectivity in information processing and it is not necessarily also reflected in a user’s consciousness, as it is rooted in skill memory or other implicit procedural memory forms–that is, attention is rooted in the necessity of human control of mental operations and actions. (...)
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  • Attention alters appearances and solves the 'many-many problem'.Miguel Angel Sebastian & Raúl Sánchez-García - 2015 - European Journal of Human Movement 34:156-179.
    This article states that research in skill acquisitionand executionhas underestimated the relevance of some features of attention. We present and theoretically discuss two essential features of attention that have been systematically overlooked in the research of skill acquisitionandexecution. First, attention alters the appearance of the perceived stimuli in an essential way; and second, attention plays a fundamental role in action, being crucial for solving the so called ’many-many problem’, that is to say, the problem of generating a coherent behavior byselecting (...)
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  • The Role of Saliency in Learning First Words.Eugenia Wildt, Katharina J. Rohlfing & Ingrid Scharlau - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10.
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  • Attention Is Amplification, Not Selection.Peter Fazekas & Bence Nanay - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (1):299-324.
    We argue that recent empirical findings and theoretical models shed new light on the nature of attention. According to the resulting amplification view, attentional phenomena can be unified at the neural level as the consequence of the amplification of certain input signals of attention-independent perceptual computations. This way of identifying the core realizer of attention evades standard criticisms often raised against sub-personal accounts of attention. Moreover, this approach also reframes our thinking about the function of attention by shifting the focus (...)
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  • A Neural Network Framework for Cognitive Bias.Johan E. Korteling, Anne-Marie Brouwer & Alexander Toet - 2018 - Frontiers in Psychology 9:358644.
    Human decision making shows systematic simplifications and deviations from the tenets of rationality (‘heuristics’) that may lead to suboptimal decisional outcomes (‘cognitive biases’). There are currently three prevailing theoretical perspectives on the origin of heuristics and cognitive biases: a cognitive-psychological, an ecological and an evolutionary perspective. However, these perspectives are mainly descriptive and none of them provides an overall explanatory framework for the underlying mechanisms of cognitive biases. To enhance our understanding of cognitive heuristics and biases we propose a neural (...)
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  • A Dilemma for ‘Selection‐for‐Action’.Denis Buehler - 2018 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 7 (2):139-149.
    One of the most influential recent accounts of attention is Wayne Wu’s. According to Wu, attention is selection-for-action. I argue that this proposal faces a dilemma: either it denies clear cases of attention capture, or it acknowledges these cases but classifies many inattentive episodes as attentive.
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  • Experts and Deviants: The Story of Agentive Control.Wayne Wu - 2016 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 93 (1):101-26.
    This essay argues that current theories of action fail to explain agentive control because they have left out a psychological capacity central to control: attention. This makes it impossible to give a complete account of the mental antecedents that generate action. By investigating attention, and in particular the intention-attention nexus, we can characterize the functional role of intention in an illuminating way, explicate agentive control so that we have a uniform explanation of basic cases of causal deviance in action as (...)
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  • Horizonal Extensions of Attention: A Phenomenological Study of the Contextuality and Habituality of Experience.Thiemo Breyer & Maren Wehrle - 2016 - Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 47 (1):41-61.
    Attention is a complex process that modulates perception in various ways. Phenomenological philosophy provides an array of concepts for describing the rich structures of attention, thereby avoiding reductions to singular aspects of an experiential spectrum. By suggesting various modes and levels of attentional experience, we intend to do some justice to its complexity, taking into account sub-personal and personal factors on the side of subjective (noetic) horizons and feature-oriented as well as context-oriented aspects on the side of objective (noematic) horizons.
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  • Action without attention.Carolyn Dicey Jennings & Bence Nanay - 2016 - Analysis 76 (1):29-36.
    Wayne Wu argues that attention is necessary for action: since action requires a solution to the ‘Many–Many Problem’, and since only attention can solve the Many–Many Problem, attention is necessary for action. We question the first of these two steps and argue that it is based on an oversimplified distinction between actions and reflexes. We argue for a more complex typology of behaviours where one important category is action that does not require a solution to the Many–Many Problem, and so (...)
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  • Homing in on consciousness in the nervous system: An action-based synthesis.Ezequiel Morsella, Christine A. Godwin, Tiffany K. Jantz, Stephen C. Krieger & Adam Gazzaley - 2016 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39:1-70.
    What is the primary function of consciousness in the nervous system? The answer to this question remains enigmatic, not so much because of a lack of relevant data, but because of the lack of a conceptual framework with which to interpret the data. To this end, we have developed Passive Frame Theory, an internally coherent framework that, from an action-based perspective, synthesizes empirically supported hypotheses from diverse fields of investigation. The theory proposes that the primary function of consciousness is well-circumscribed, (...)
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  • Parallel Models of Serial Behaviour: Lashley Revisited.George Houghton & Tom Hartley - 1995 - PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 2.
    In 1951, Lashley highlighted the importance of serial order for the brain and behavioural sciences. He considered the response chaining account untenable and proposed an alternative employing parallel response activation and "schemata for action". Subsequently, much has been learned about sequential behaviour, particularly in the linguistic domain. We argue that these developments support Lashley's picture, and recent computational models compatible with it are described. The models are developed in a series of steps, beginning with the basic problem of parallel response (...)
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  • The gap between inattentional blindness and attentional misdirection.Daniel Memmert - 2010 - Consciousness and Cognition 19 (4):1097-1101.
    Kuhn and colleagues described a novel attentional misdirection approach to investigate overt and covert attention mechanisms in connection with inattentional blindness . This misdirection paradigm is valuable to study the temporal relationship between eye movements and visual awareness. Although, as put forth in this comment, the link between attentional misdirection and inattentional blindness needs to be developed further. There are at least four differences between the two paradigms which concern the conceptual aspects of the unexpected object and the methodological aspects (...)
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  • Awareness and error detection: New theories and research paradigms.Donald G. MacKay - 1992 - Consciousness and Cognition 1 (3):199-225.
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  • Emancipatory Attention.Christopher Mole - 2024 - Philosophers' Imprint 24 (1).
    The aim of this paper is to show that, for the purposes of addressing the epistemic aspects of systemic injustice, we need a notion of emancipatory attention. When the epistemic and ethical elements of an injustice are intertwined, it is a misleading idealisation to think of these epistemological elements as calling for the promotion of knowledge through a rational dialectic. Taking them to instead call for a campaign of consciousness-raising runs into difficulties of its own, when negotiating the twin risks (...)
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  • Can Representationism Explain how Attention Affects Appearances?Sebastian Watzl - 2018 - In Adam Pautz & Daniel Stoljar (eds.), Blockheads! Essays on Ned Block’s Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness. new york: MIT Press. pp. 481-607.
    Recent psychological research shows that attention affects appearances. An “attended item looks bigger, faster, earlier, more saturated, stripier.” (Block 2010, p. 41). What is the significance of these findings? Ned Block has argued that they undermine representationism, roughly the view that the phenomenal character of perception is determined by its representational content. My first goal in this paper is to show that Block’s argument has the structure of a Problem of Arbitrary Phenomenal Variation and that it improves on other instances (...)
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  • The GIST of concepts.Ronaldo Vigo - 2013 - Cognition 129 (1):138-162.
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  • A model of the hierarchy of behaviour, cognition, and consciousness.Frederick Toates - 2006 - Consciousness and Cognition 15 (1):75-118.
    Processes comparable in important respects to those underlying human conscious and non-conscious processing can be identified in a range of species and it is argued that these reflect evolutionary precursors of the human processes. A distinction is drawn between two types of processing: stimulus-based and higher-order. For ‘higher-order,’ in humans the operations of processing are themselves associated with conscious awareness. Conscious awareness sets the context for stimulus-based processing and its end-point is accessible to conscious awareness. However, the mechanics of the (...)
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  • Psychoneural isomorphism: Historical background and current relevance.Eckart Scheerer - 1994 - Philosophical Psychology 7 (2):183-210.
    The relevance of Wolfgang K hler's psychoneural isomorphism principle to contemporary cognitive neuroscience is explored. K hler's approach to the mind—body problem is interpreted as a response to the foundational crisis of psychology at the beginning of the twentieth century. Some aspects of his isomorphism doctrine are discussed, with a view to reaching an interpretation that is both historically accurate and pertinent to issues currently debated in the philosophy of psychology. The principle was meant to be empirically verifiable. Accordingly, some (...)
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  • Attention, moral skill, and algorithmic recommendation.Nick Schuster & Seth Lazar - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies:1-26.
    Recommender systems are artificial intelligence technologies, deployed by online platforms, that model our individual preferences and direct our attention to content we’re likely to engage with. As the digital world has become increasingly saturated with information, we’ve become ever more reliant on these tools to efficiently allocate our attention. And our reliance on algorithmic recommendation may, in turn, reshape us as moral agents. While recommender systems could in principle enhance our moral agency by enabling us to cut through the information (...)
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  • Attentional progress by conceptual engineering.Eve Kitsik - 2021 - Metaphilosophy 53 (2-3):254-266.
    Does conceptual engineering as a philosophical method deserve all the attention that it has been getting recently? The important philosophical questions, one might say, are about the world, not about what our concepts are or should be like. This paper fleshes out one way in which conceptual engineering can contribute to philosophical progress. The suspicion that conceptual engineering is getting too much attention presupposes that it is important to distribute our philosophical attention well (for example, conceptual engineering should not get (...)
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  • Outlines of a multiple trace theory of temporal preparation.Sander A. Los, Wouter Kruijne & Martijn Meeter - 2014 - Frontiers in Psychology 5.
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  • Decentering and attention.Victor Lange - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
    Clinical psychologists describe decentering as the mental operation in which a subject “moves out” of immersion in a mental state. Such decentering is philosophically puzzling. It involves that a subject attends to her mental state to distance herself from it. That is, she attends to the state to make it less determining of her processing. This paper provides a philosophical explanation of the nature of decentering. It analyses decentering as a complex mental operation composed of two sub-operations: introspection and detachment. (...)
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  • Action always involves attention.Wayne Wu - 2019 - Analysis 79 (4):693-703.
    Jennings and Nanay (this journal, 2016) argue against my claim that action entails attention by providing putative counterexamples to the claim that action entails a Many–Many Problem. This reply demonstrates that they have misunderstood the central notion of a pure reflex on which my argument depends. A simplified form of the argument from pure reflex to the Many–Many Problem as a necessary feature of agency is given, and putative counterexamples of action without attention are addressed. Attention is present in every (...)
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  • A theory of eye movements during target acquisition.Gregory J. Zelinsky - 2008 - Psychological Review 115 (4):787-835.
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  • The Neural Basis of Error Detection: Conflict Monitoring and the Error-Related Negativity.Nick Yeung, Matthew M. Botvinick & Jonathan D. Cohen - 2004 - Psychological Review 111 (4):931-959.
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  • Successive Approximations to an Adequate Model of Attention.A. H. C. van der Heijden & S. Bem - 1997 - Consciousness and Cognition 6 (2-3):413-428.
    Everybody knows the phenomena summarized with the term attention: concentration, focalization, limitation, selection, and intensification . The explanation of these phenomena is, however, a different matter. Problems easily arise with regard towhathas to be explained and with regard to thestyleof explanation. A problem of the first kind is the “methodology of ‘bad focus’”: the explanation starts with and is fixated on an intuitively striking but nonessential behavioral feature or cognitive achievement. A problem of the second kind is a “virtus dormitiva” (...)
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  • Narrative immersion as an attentional phenomenon.Paloma Atencia-Linares & Miguel Ángel Sebastián - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Some stories generate in us a peculiar experience of intense narrative engagement. This common experience, which we call narrative immersion, has been the object of a vast literature in psychology and other disciplines. Philosophers, however, have only recently engaged with this topic and the tendency has been to explain it by postulating specific kinds of mental states. We propose a different approach, explaining narrative immersion by means of a particular distribution of attention over the content of ordinary mental states. First, (...)
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  • Effects of monitoring for visual events on distinct components of attention.Christian H. Poth, Anders Petersen, Claus Bundesen & Werner X. Schneider - 2014 - Frontiers in Psychology 5:98474.
    Monitoring the environment for visual events while performing a concurrent task requires adjustment of visual processing priorities. By use of Bundesen's (1990) Theory of Visual Attention (TVA), we investigated how monitoring for an object-based brief event affected distinct components of visual attention in a concurrent task. The perceptual salience of the event was varied. Monitoring reduced the processing speed in the concurrent task, and the reduction was stronger when the event was less salient. The monitoring task neither affected the temporal (...)
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  • The inevitable contrast: Conscious vs. unconscious processes in action control.Ezequiel Morsella & T. Andrew Poehlman - 2013 - Frontiers in Psychology 4.
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  • Passive frame theory: A new synthesis.Ezequiel Morsella, Christine A. Godwin, Tiffany K. Jantz, Stephen C. Krieger & Adam Gazzaley - 2016 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39:e199.
    Passive frame theory attempts to illuminate what consciousnessis, in mechanistic and functional terms; it does not address the “implementation” level of analysis (how neurons instantiate conscious states), an enigma for various disciplines. However, in response to the commentaries, we discuss how our framework provides clues regarding this enigma. In the framework, consciousness is passive albeit essential. Without consciousness, there would not be adaptive skeletomotor action.
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  • Visual selection of multiple movement goals.Daniel Baldauf - unknown
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