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 and choices, but the possibilities we choose among, and even the meaning what we perceive, are to a large extent determined by whether we pay attention, and what we attend do. In this way, the book argues that attention is fundamental, though often overlooked, in morality. While the book's discussion of attention revolves primarily around Murdoch's thought, it also engages significantly with Simone Weil, who introduced the concept of attention in a spiritual context. The book also engages with contemporary debates concerning moral perception and motivation, empirical psychology, animal ethics, and Buddhist philosophy. The Ethics of Attention will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil, ethics and moral psychology, and the philosophy of attention. (shrink)

Writing to the young emperor Nero, Seneca elaborates a sophisticated distinction between compassion and mercy for use in forensic contexts, agreeing with earlier Stoics that compassion is a vice, but adding that there is a virtue called mercy or 'clemency.' This Stoic repudiation of compassion has won the attention of Nussbaum, who argues that it was motivated by a respect for persons as dignified agents, and was of a piece with the Stoics' cosmopolitanism. This chapter engages Nussbaum's presentation of (...) the Stoics, examining Seneca’s On Clemency and Epictetus' use of the term prohairesis, showing that while there is some truth in her characterization, it needs to be qualified in important ways. It also analyzes Augustine's engagement with Seneca's On Clemency in the City of God 9.5, and in his letters concerning punishment for vandalism, theft, and human trafficking. It argues that Augustine has a nuanced mercy ethic that is deeply informed by Seneca's position, but that he intentionally improves upon it. (shrink)

According to the thesis of transparency, subjects can attend only to the representational content of perceptual experience, never to the intrinsic properties of experience that carry this representational content, i.e., to “mental paint.” So far, arguments for and against transparency were conducted from the armchair, relying mainly on introspective observations. In this paper, we argue in favor of transparency, relying on the cognitive neuroscience of attention. We present a trilemma to those who hold that attention can be directed (...) to mental paint. Such attention is either first-order sensory, higher-order cognitive, or higher-order sensory attention. We argue that the notion of first-order sensory attention to mental paint is incompatible with the neuroscience of sensory attention; that higher-order cognitive attention to mental paint is irrelevant to transparency; and that the notion of higher-order sensory attention to mental paint has an apparently incoherent prediction. Via elimination, these considerations support the thesis of transparency. (shrink)

Visual phenomenology is highly elusive. One attempt to operationalize or to measure it is to use ‘cognitive accessibility’ to track its degrees. However, if Ned Block is right about the overflow phenomenon, then this way of operationalizing visual phenomenology is bound to fail. This thesis does not directly challenge Block’s view; rather it motivates a notion of cognitive accessibility different from Block’s one, and argues that given this notion, degrees of visual phenomenology can be tracked by degrees of cognitive accessibility. (...) Block points out that in the psychology literature, ‘cognitive accessibility’ is often regarded as either all or nothing. However, the notion motivated in the thesis captures the important fact that accessibility comes in degrees (consider the visual field from fovea the periphery). Different legitimate notions of accessibility might be adopted for different purposes. The notion of accessibility motivated here is weaker than Block’s ‘identification’ (2007) but is stronger than Tye’s ‘demonstration’ (2007). The moral drawn from the discussion of Block can be applied to the debate between Dretske and Tye on the speckled-hen style examples. Dretske’s view is even stronger than Block’s, but his arguments from various figures he provides do not support his conclusion since he does not have right ideas about fixation and attention. Tye’s picture is more plausible but his notion of accessibility is so weak that he reaches the excessive conclusion that accessibility overflows phenomenology. Three ramifications might be considered in the final part of the thesis. The first is the relation between this debate and the one concerning higher-order/same-order theories of consciousness. The second is about John McDowell’s early proposal about demonstrative concepts in visual experiences. The third is the relation between the interpretation of the Sperling case proposed here and McDowell new view of experiential contents, i.e., his story about how we carve out conceptual contents out of intuitional contents without falling pray to the Myth of the Given. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophers have identified a number of moral and psychological harms associated with the attention economy (Alysworth & Castro, 2021; Castro & Pham, 2020; Williams, 2018). Missing from many of these accounts of the attention economy, however, is what exactly attention is. As a result of this neglect of the cognitive science of attention, many of these accounts are not empirically credible. They rely on oversimplified and unsophisticated accounts of not only attention, but (...) self- control, and addiction as well. Of note are accounts of the attention economy that rely on the ‘brain disease’ rhetoric of addiction and subsequent control failures (Aylsworth & Castro, 2021; Bhargava & Velasquez, 2021), accounts that rely on a strict dichotomy of top-down vs. bottom-up attention (Williams, 2018; Aylsworth & Castro, 2021), and accounts that construe attention as a limited resource (Williams, 2018). -/- Drawing on recent work from the neuroscience and psychology of attention, I demonstrate the shortcomings of these accounts and sketch a way forward for an empirically grounded account of the attention economy. These accounts tend to uphold strict dichotomies of voluntary control (e.g., compulsion versus choice, dual-process models of self-control, and top-down versus bottom-up) that cannot account for the complexities of attentional control, mental agency, and decision-making. As such, these empirically and conceptually impoverished accounts cannot adequately address the current so-called crisis of attention. To better understand the harms associated with the attention economy, we need an empirically responsible account of the nature and function of attention and mental agency. (shrink)

Much of the philosophical attention directed to pride focuses on the normative puzzle of determining how pride can be both a central vice and a central virtue. But there is another puzzle, a descriptive puzzle, of determining how the emotion of pride and the character trait of pride relate to each other. A solution is offered to the descriptive puzzle that builds upon the accounts of Hume and Gabriele Taylor, but avoids the pitfalls of those accounts. In particular, the (...) emotion and the trait correspond to two employments of personal ideals: personal ideals as standards of self-assessment and personal ideals as practical guides in one’s deliberation and related activities. This account, in turn, provides a framework for solving the normative puzzle. (shrink)

Did you ever wonder why you are sometimes too tired to watch a film, and would rather watch some TV show? And then, you might end up watching five or six hours and binge watch an entire season, and yet feel too tired to commit yourself to a single 2-hour film piece. The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, I will try to investigate whether there are any ontological differences in the form of a film or a television show. (...) Second, I will try to connect the newest neurological and psychological research regarding binging and attention span and see how seriality influences our brains. I will use the recent neurological findings to try to answer the question of why it seems easier to watch the same number of episodes rather than a single movie. Third, I will use David Lynch's and Mark Frost's third season of Twin Peaks as an example illustrating the blurry borders between a television show and a film, while contrasting it to the binge-watching phenomenon. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 282-294, April 2022.

Several authors have recently suggested that classic psychedelics might be safe and effective agents of moral enhancement. This raises the question: can we learn anything interesting about the nature of moral experience from a close examination of transformative psychedelic experiences? The interdisciplinary enterprise of philosophical psychopathology attempts to learn about the structure and function of the “ordinary” mind by studying the radically altered mind. By analogy, in this chapter we argue that we can gain knowledge about the everyday moral life (...) by studying extraordinary experiences of altered moral cognition and experience. We focus on a specific class of cases: experiences of forgiveness induced by psychedelics. We argue that close attention to such experiences reveals the importance of thought/emotion coherence and dissonance in the moral life and vindicates some heterodox ideas about moral phenomenology and psychology. (shrink)

Patient RB has a peculiar memory impairment wherein he experiences his memories in rich contextual detail, but claims to not own them. His memories do not feel as if they happened to him. In this paper, I provide an explanatory model of RB’s phenomenology, the self-attentional model. I draw upon recent work in neuroscience on self-attentional processing and global workspace models of conscious recollection to show that RB has a self-attentional deficit that inhibits self-bias processes in broadcasting the contents of (...) episodic memories to the global workspace. Typically, self-related contents enjoy a higher salience level than other-related contents. Elimination of bias toward self-related contents diminishes the salience of those contents to the level of other-related contents. Because the typical high salience of self-related content is necessary for the feeling of ownership, RB lacks the feeling of ownership. I also discuss potential applications of the self-attentional model to other psychopathological cases. (shrink)

Pets are truly great companions. Some individuals feel that owning a pet can help them prepare for a growing family by giving them a taste of what it would be like to have children. This study also looks into the psychological well-being and life experiences of LGBT fur parents. Employing the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, the findings of this study were: (1) With the presence of fur babies, participants had the ease to overcome stressful events, especially the ones that affect their (...) mental health. With these, they have the desire to take care of their fur babies under all circumstances because they see their fur babies as family members. Fur babies are excellent sources of motivation, confidence, and happiness for fur parents. They are treated as family members because they contribute to the mental and emotional aspects of fur parents. Moreover, the majority of respondents valued their pets far more than their actual family members, however, some didn't spend as much time with their relatives and friends. This study comes to the conclusion that a stronger bond with one's dog was also linked to higher anxiety about being unloved and rejected by family members and people surrounding us, which was linked to a heavier impact on one's psychological well-being. In reality, fur parents, especially LGBT parents, offer their fur babies a lot of love and attention compared to other things. (shrink)

Psychological well-being is a major global concern receiving more scholarly attention following the 2008 Great Recession, and it becomes even more relevant in the context of COVID-19 outbreak. In this study, we investigated the impact of economic uncertainty resulting from natural disasters, epidemics, and financial crisis on individuals' mental health. As unemployment rate exponentially increases, individuals are faced with health and economic concerns. Not all society members are affected to the same extent, and marginalized groups, such as those suffering (...) from chronic mental illnesses or low-income families cannot afford the downsizing, mass lay-offs and lack of access to public health services. Psychiatric profession is familiarized with the phenomenon of intolerance of uncertainty (IU), and we examine how this concept is associated with job uncertainty and social identity disturbance. Several studies have formally investigated the effects of IU, but to our knowledge, this is the first research integrating the psychological well-being, job uncertainty and identity disturbance caused by economic breakdown. Literature points to many reported cases of PTSD, anxiety, depression and suicidal tendencies following major social disasters. Yet, we have undertaken to analyze the subjective experiences underlying the self-harming behaviors in an attempt to fill the methodological gap by drawing insights from prominent psychological, sociological and economic theories. We find economic uncertainty to have a positive relation to job uncertainty and identity disturbance, and a negative relationship with psychological well-being. Psychological well-being depends on coherency between both abstract subjective and concrete objective identity, and when these perceptions are inconsistent, cognitive dissonance arises resulting in identity disturbance. We argue that stability is not associated with monetary advantage only, but also with a wide range of other benefits that are crucial for individuals' growth, satisfaction and sense of identity. Therefore, we propose the implementation of social support and public welfare policies to mitigate health risks during the turbulent socio-economic changes. (shrink)

Focused attention is needed to perceive change (Rensink et al., 1997; Psychological Science, 8: 368-373) . But how much attentional processing is given to an item? And does this depend on the nature of the task? To answer these questions, "flicker" displays were created, where an original and a modified image continually alternated, with brief blanks between them. Each image was an array of simple figures, half being horizontal and the other half vertical. In half the trials, one of (...) the items changed orientation; in the remainder, all items remained the same. Observers were asked to detect whether a change was occurring in each trial. -/- Within-observer comparisons for different shapes of items yielded two classes of speed: relatively fast search (50 ms/item) for simple lines, and slower search (90 ms/item) for compound figures made of two or more lines. Evidently, more processing was given to compound figures, even though shape was irrelevant to the task. A similar set of experiments asked observers to detect changes in contrast polarity. Here, no differences were found for different shapes, indicating that geometric information is not processed as much when the task involves only nongeometric properties. (shrink)

Why do our intuitive knowledge ascriptions shift when a subject's practical interests are mentioned? Many efforts to answer this question have focused on empirical linguistic evidence for context sensitivity in knowledge claims, but the empirical psychology of belief formation and attribution also merits attention. The present paper examines a major psychological factor (called ?need-for-closure?) relevant to ascriptions involving practical interests. Need-for-closure plays an important role in determining whether one has a settled belief; it also influences the accuracy of (...) one's cognition. Given these effects, it is a mistake to assume that high- and low-stakes subjects provided with the same initial evidence are perceived to enjoy belief formation that is the same as far as truth-conducive factors are concerned. This mistaken assumption has underpinned contextualist and interest-relative invariantist treatments of cases in which contrasting knowledge ascriptions are elicited by descriptions of subjects with the same initial information and different stakes. The paper argues that intellectualist invariantism can easily accommodate such cases. (shrink)

Demonstrative thoughts are distinguished by the fact that their contents are determined relationally, via perception, rather than descriptively. Therefore, a fundamental task of a theory of demonstrative thought is to elucidate how facts about visual perception can explain how these thoughts come to have the contents that they do. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how cognitive psychology may help us solve this metasemantic question, through empirical models of visual processing. Although there is a dispute between attentional (...) and non-attentional models concerning the best metasemantic mechanism for demonstrative thoughts, in this paper I will argue in favor of a hybrid model, which combines both types of processes. In this picture, attentional and non-attentional mechanisms are not mutually exclusive, and each plays a specific role in determining the singular content of demonstrative thoughts. (shrink)

'Mindfulness' is arguably the most important concept to have transplanted from Buddhist thought to contemporary Western psychology. However, whilst mindfulness was already an ambiguous term in the original context, specified more by a set of practices than by a clear definition, its cross-cultural transmission has blurred its content even further. In this paper, I assess the recent criticism of the widespread definition of mindfulness as non-elaborative, purely receptive 'bare attention'. According to the critics of bare attention, what (...) can be characterized as purely receptive is the automatic turning of attention toward an object. But should mindfulness be a quality of consciousness that is to be established and developed by the reflexive practice of meditation, it must be something more than this automatic turning of attention. This paper shows how the definition of mindfulness as bare attention can be defended by explicating it in terms of the phenomenological model of attention. (shrink)

Ethics for Rational Animals brings to light a novel account of akrasia, practical wisdom, and character virtue through an original and comprehensive study of the moral psychology at the basis of Aristotle's ethics. It argues that practical wisdom is a persuasive rational excellence, that virtue is a listening excellence, and that the ignorance involved in akrasia is in fact a failure of persuasion. Aristotle's moral psychology emerges from this reconstruction as a qualified intellectualism. The view is intellectualistic because (...) it describes practical wisdom as the sort of knowledge that can govern desire and action and akrasia as involving a form of ignorance. However, Aristotle's intellectualism is qualified because practical wisdom goes beyond grasping the truth about the human good, for it must also be able to convey the truth persuasively to non-rational cognition and desires. (shrink)

How do individuals guide their activities towards some goal? Harry Frankfurt once identified the task of explaining guidance as the central problem in action theory. An explanation has proved to be elusive, however. In this paper, I show how we can marshal empirical research to make explanatory progress. I contend that human agents have a primitive capacity to guide visual attention, and that this capacity is actually constituted by a sub-individual psychological control-system: the executive system. I thus illustrate how (...) we can explain exercises of individual-level guidance by appeal to its sub-individual constitution. This opens up a new avenue for explicating agency. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 28, Issue 2, pp 132 - 148 A striking feature of Thomas Hobbes’s account of political obligation is his discussion of the Fool, who thinks it reasonable to adopt a policy of selective, self-interested covenant breaking. Surprisingly, scholars have paid little attention to the potential of a psychological defense of Hobbes’s controversial claim that the Fool behaves irrationally. In this paper, I first describe Hobbes’s account of the Fool and argue that the kind of Fool most (...) worth considering is the covert, long-term Fool. Then I advance and critically assess two psychological arguments according to which the Fool’s policy of self-interested covenant breaking is prudentially irrational. The first argument holds that, taken together, the deep guilt from early-stage covenant breaking, the cumulative guilt from continued covenant breaking, and the high statistical risk of detection during high-volume covenant breaking render the Fool’s policy irrational. The second argument holds that the Fool’s policy is irrational because it puts him at risk of adopting a psychologically intolerable view of his fellow covenanters and, specifically, the extent to which they can be trusted. (shrink)

Among the cognitive processes involved in the construction of any kind of meaning, attention is fundamental in determining why, how and what we mean. Attention plays a primary role in the process of learning the meanings of words and more generally of acquiring knowledge; signification, discourse and persuasion; perceiving, representing and (re)framing reality; shaping the attitudes of the audience; conveying values and ideologies. Conversely, the meanings of words and more generally, of signs, convey the condensed instructions for the (...) attentional operations one has to perform in order to consciously experience what is expressed through and by them. Language, by addressing and guiding attention in specific ways, helps to select, amplify and support certain semantic components and concepts, and construct and communicate knowledge and values. This book is the first to present a comprehensive overview of the extant research on the relationships between attention and meaning. The contributions collected here offer an overview of the most prominent theories and models developed so far that aim to explain how attention determines meaning construction. This book will be of interest to students, researchers and teachers in the realm of linguistics, semantics, discourse studies, semiotics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, linguistic development, cognitive architectures of language, neuropsychology of linguistic function and social psychology. (shrink)

Important empirically informed proposals of virtue cultivation invoke techniques of goal pursuit. This paper argues that these techniques are effective in changing behavior due to the attention narrowing they bring about, and further show that such attention narrowing can threaten the appropriate exercise of phronetic-related capacities. When these phronetic-related capacities are threatened, two derivative problems arise: (1) One can end up acting in morally inappropriate ways, and (2) Even in cases where one performs the morally appropriate action, one (...) nonetheless can fail to notice and appreciate features of moral value. In light of these concerns, such techniques of goal pursuit – at least, by themselves – serve the most good for those who are merely trying to avoid vice, rather than cultivate virtue. And so, I suggest that such accounts of virtue cultivation are incomplete. I then go on to argue that these undesirable effects of attention narrowing brought about by these goal pursuit techniques may be ameliorated by also engaging in certain indirect modifications of cognition, particularly those which broaden attention. The suggestion, then, is that attention narrowing techniques of goal pursuit, along with attention broadening modifications, might best facilitate virtue cultivation when employed together. While the particulars of how we might best go about this are currently unclear, this paper ends by looking at empirical research on Open Monitoring Meditation as providing a hopeful option that might be further investigated. (shrink)

APPENDIX: The data emerging from the clinical and brain studies described above suggest that, in the case of OCD, there are two pertinent brain mechanisms that are distinguishable both in terms of neuro-dynamics and in terms of the conscious experiences that accompany them. These mechanisms can be characterized, on anatomical and perhaps evolutionary grounds, as a lower-level and a higher-level mechanism. The clinical treatment has, when successful, an activating effect on the higher-level mechanism, and a suppressive effect on the lower-level (...) one. (shrink)

Eleonore Stump has argued that the fulfilment of union between God and human beings requires a mode of relatedness that can be compared to joint attention, a phenomenon studied in contemporary experimental psychology. Stump’s account of union, however, is challenged by the fact that mother Teresa, despite her apparent manifestation of the love of God to others, herself experienced an interior ”dark night of the soul’ during which God seemed to be absent and to have rejected her completely. (...) The dark night of the soul poses a problem for Stump’s account, since, if anyone had a union of divine love with God, it would seem that mother Teresa did. Nevertheless, I argue that the isolation and abandonment of mother Teresa’s dark night are contrary to the conditions assumed to be required for joint attention with God. As an alternative to Stump’s account, I suggest that the dark night of the soul might be better understood by reference to a combination of joint attention and blindsight, according to which interpersonal closeness might be realized through a consistent pattern of external actions without, however, a direct awareness of one person by the other. (shrink)

Empirical research in the psychology of nature appreciation suggests that humans across cultures tend to evaluate nature in positive aesthetic terms, including a sense of beauty and awe. They also frequently engage in joint attention with other persons, whereby they are jointly aware of sharing attention to the same event or object. This paper examines how, from a natural theological perspective, delight in natural beauty can be conceptualized as a way of joining attention to creation. Drawing (...) on an analogy between art and creation, we propose that aesthetic appreciation of nature may provide theists with a unique phenomenological insight into God's creative intentions, which are embodied in the physical beauty of creation. We suggest two directions in which this way of looking at the natural world can be fleshed out: in a spontaneous way, that does not take into account background information, and with the help of science. (shrink)

In this thesis three independent answers to the question ‘what is attention?’ are provided. Each answer is a description of attention given through one of the perspectives that people have on the mental phenomenon. The first answer is the common-sense answer to the question, and is an account of the folk psychology of attention. The understanding of attention put forward here is of attention as a limited, divisible resource that is used in mental acts. (...) The second answer is the empirical answer to the question, and is an account of the metaphysics of attention. The understanding of attention put forward here is the account of attention proposed by Christopher Mole in his theory of attention as cognitive unison. The third answer is the experiential answer to the question, and is an account of the phenomenology of attention. The understanding of attention put forward here is of attention as a kind of directed mental effort. These three answers to the question are shown to be intimately related to each other, and to inform each other in important ways. They are also shown to be fundamentally different answers to each other with none being reducible to another, or more important than another. In the end, they will be found to be answers that arise from the differing perspectives that people are restricted to when considering the nature of mental phenomena, perspectives that must be recognised if an account of such phenomena is to be provided. (shrink)

This paper looks at the question of what it means for a psychological test to have construct validity. I approach this topic by way of an analysis of recent debates about the measurement of implicit social cognition. After showing that there is little theoretical agreement about implicit social cognition, and that the predictive validity of implicit tests appears to be low, I turn to a debate about their construct validity. I show that there are two questions at stake: First, what (...) level of detail and precision does a construct have to possess such that a test can in principle be valid relative to it? And second, what kind of evidence needs to be in place such that a test can be regarded as validated relative to a given construct? I argue that construct validity is not an all-or-nothing affair. It can come in degrees, because both our constructs and our knowledge of the explanatory relation between constructs and data can vary in accuracy and level of detail, and a test can fail to measure all of the features associated with a construct. I conclude by arguing in favor of greater philosophical attention to processes of construct development. (shrink)

Joint attention occurs when two (or more) individuals attend together to some object. It has been identified by psychologists as an early form of our joint engagement, and is thought to provide us with an understanding of other minds that is basic in that sophisticated conceptual resources are not involved. Accordingly, it has also attracted the interest of philosophers. Moreover, a very recent trend in the psychological and philosophical literature on joint attention consists of developing the suggestion that (...) it holds partially in virtue of communication: it is because we share our thoughts or feelings about an object that our individual attention becomes joint. This paper unpacks the communicative suggestion in a way that accounts for joint attention's basicness. (shrink)

One of the greatest philosophical disputes in Germany in the latter half of the 19th century concerned the value of life. Following Arthur Schopenhauer, numerous philosophers sought to defend the provocative view that life is not worth living. A persistent objection to pessimism is that it is not really a philosophical theory at all, but rather a psychological state; a mood or disposition which is the product of socio-economic circumstance. A developed and influential version of this view was advanced in (...) the 1870’s by the English psychologist James Sully. Yet, as important as Sully’s critique was for the pessimism dispute, it has been almost entirely overlooked in the history of philosophy. With some growing recent attention to 19th century pessimism, this paper aims to reconstruct Sully’s view, and what I argue is his primary argument for it in terms of the best explanation for an alleged historical correlation between pessimistic belief and social hardship in the form of frustrated ideals. The paper then presents and analyses some challenges to this argument, some of which are argued to have been at least partially anticipated in the 19th century by the likes of Schopenhauer and Olga Plümacher. (shrink)

An important topic in the ethics of technology is the extent to which recent digital technologies undermine user autonomy. Supporting evidence includes the fact that recent digital technologies are known to have an impact on attention, which balances "bottom-up" and "top-down" influences on cognition. As described in numerous papers, these technologies manipulate bottom-up influences through cognitive fluency, intermittent variable rewards, and other techniques, making them more attractive to the user. We further reason that recent digital technologies reduce the user’s (...) ability to exert top-down attention due to the scale of the content—they provide far more content at a much faster pace than other technologies, which over time reweights the balance of attention in favor of bottom-up influences. After reviewing evidence for these effects, including their temporal duration, we consider their downstream effects on both autonomy and creativity. We find that while the impact of recent digital technologies on top-down attention may allow for more idea generation, that creativity also depends on control, which is undermined by these technologies. We are more circumspect with autonomy, reasoning that in certain cases it might not make sense to see user autonomy as harmed through these effects. We conclude with other ways that recent digital technologies may improve creativity, which may act as an offset to the detrimental impacts of these technologies. (shrink)

Perception of time is susceptible to distortions; among other factors, it has been suggested that the perceived duration of a stimulus is affected by the observer’s expectations. It has been hypothesized that the duration of an oddball stimulus is overestimated because it is unexpected, whereas repeated stimuli have a shorter perceived duration because they are expected. However, recent findings suggest instead that fulfilled expectations about a stimulus elicit an increase in perceived duration, and that the oddball effect occurs because the (...) oddball is a target stimulus, not because it is unexpected. Therefore, it has been suggested that top-down attention is sometimes sufficient to explain this effect, and sometimes only necessary, with an additional contribution from saliency. However, how the expectedness of a target stimulus and its salient features affect its perceived duration is still an open question. In the present study, participants’ expectations about and the saliency of target stimuli were orthogonally manipulated with stimuli presented on a short (Experiment 1) or long (Experiment 2) temporal scale. Four repetitive standard stimuli preceded each target stimulus in a task in which participants judged whether the target was longer or shorter in duration than the standards. Engagement of top-down attention to target stimuli increased their perceived duration to the same extent irrespective of their expectedness. A small but significant additional contribution to this effect from the saliency of target stimuli was dependent on the temporal scale of stimulus presentation. In Experiment 1, saliency only significantly increased perceived duration in the case of expected target stimuli. In contrast, in Experiment 2, saliency exerted a significant effect on the overestimation elicited by unexpected target stimuli, but the contribution of this variable was eliminated in the case of expected target stimuli. These findings point to top-down attention as the primary cognitive mechanism underlying the perceptual extraction and processing of task-relevant information, which may be strongly correlated with perceived duration. Furthermore, the scalar properties of timing were observed, favoring the pacemaker-accumulator model of timing as the underlying timing mechanism. (shrink)

A major flaw of the book is its failure to note Wittgenstein’s role in destroying the mechanical or reductionist or computationalist view of mind. These continue to dominate cognitive science and philosophy, in spite of the fact that they were powerfully countered by W and later by Searle and others. -/- There is much talk of W’s use of terms like “grammar”, “rules” etc. but never a clear mention that they mean our Evolved Psychology or our genetically programmed innate (...) behavior. There are references to Baker and Hacker's works and to Malcolm Budd, but none to many standard W refs such as ter Hark, Johnston, and especially to the searchable Intelex CDROM and online sites of his complete works, nor to Searle, and none to the vast literature of evolutionary psychology. -/- Many sections of the book are reasonably successful in describing W’s work but there is much aimless wandering and many mistakes and confusions. These will hopefully be obvious to those who read the above and my other reviews as I cannot recount more than a few of the hundreds of critical comments I made in my two readings of this book. A major flaw, common to most writing in the behavioral sciences, is the lack of awareness of the S1/S2 two selves or two systems of thought mode of describing personality that W pioneered (though nobody noticed) and a failure to be clear about nature/nuture issues. The fast, automatic perceptions, ‘rules’ and behaviors of S1 are mushed together with the slow conscious dispositional thinking, believing and rule following of S2 and neither are clearly or consistently distinguished from arbitrary cultural behaviors. -/- Like all authors until very recently, they fail to give Wittgenstein’s last work “On Certainty” the prominent position it deserves, and likewise fail to take advantage of the powerful dual systems of thought framework. Nor have they adopted the useful extensions of Wittgenstein’s work made by John Searle. So, I first lay out a framework for intentionality (behavior) and then provide some detailed comments. This book is a reasonable first attempt to bring W’s pioneering work on higher order thought to the attention of psychology but it has many failings and needs a thorough rewrite. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019) . (shrink)

Embodied cognitive theories predict that linguistic conceptual representations are grounded and continually represented in real world, sensorimotor experiences. However, there is an on-going debate on whether this also holds for abstract concepts. Grammar is the archetype of abstract knowledge, and therefore constitutes a test case against embodied theories of language representation. Former studies have largely focussed on lexical-level embodied representations. In the present study we take the grounding-by-modality idea a step further by using reaction time (RT) data from the linguistic (...) processing of nominal classifiers in Chinese. We take advantage of an independent body of research, which shows that attention in hand space is biased. Specifically, objects near the hand consistently yield shorter RTs as a function of readiness for action on graspable objects within reaching space, and the same biased attention inhibits attentional disengagement. We predicted that this attention bias would equally apply to the graspable object classifier but not to the big object classifier. Chinese speakers (N = 22) judged grammatical congruency of classifier-noun combinations in two conditions: graspable object classifier and big object classifier. We found that RTs for the graspable object classifier were significantly faster in congruent combinations, and significantly slower in incongruent combinations, than the big object classifier. There was no main effect on grammatical violations, but rather an interaction effect of classifier type. Thus, we demonstrate here grammatical category- specific effects pertaining to the semantic content and by extension the visual and tactile modality of acquisition underlying the acquisition of these categories. We conclude that abstract grammatical categories are subjected to the same mechanisms as general cognitive and neurophysiological processes and may therefore be grounded. (shrink)

Mainstream psychological research has been characterized as androcentric in its construction of males as the norm. Does an androcentric bias also characterize the professional visibility of psychologists? We examined this issue for cognitive psychology, where the gender distribution in doctoral degrees has been roughly equal for several decades. Our investigation revealed that, across all indicators surveyed, male cognitive psychologists are more visible than their female counterparts: they are over-represented in professional society governance, as editors-in-chief of leading journals in the (...) field, as Fellows in professional societies, and as recipients of prestigious senior level awards. Taken together, our findings indicate that a gender parity in doctoral degrees in cognitive psychology does not translate into a parity in professional visibility. We discuss a variety of potential reasons for the observed gender gap and suggest that, without attention to gendered structures of status and power, as noted by Shields, existing gender hierarchies may persist and be reproduced. (shrink)

John Clarke of Hull, one of the eighteenth century's staunchest proponents of psychological egoism, defended that theory in his Foundation of Morality in Theory and Practice. He did so mainly by opposing the objections to egoism in the first two editions of Francis Hutcheson's Inquiry into Virtue. But Clarke also produced a challenging, direct argument for egoism which, regrettably, has received virtually no scholarly attention. In this paper I give it some of the attention it merits. In addition (...) to reconstructing it and addressing interpretive issues about it, I show that it withstands a tempting objection. I also show that although Clarke's argument ultimately fails, to study it is instructive. It illuminates, for example, Hutcheson's likely intentions in a passage relevant to egoism. (shrink)

Identification of the second of two targets (T1, T2, inserted in a stream of distractors) is impaired when presented within 500 ms after the first (attentional blink, AB). Barring a T1-T2 task-switch, it is thought that T2 must be backward-masked to obtain an AB (Giesbrecht & Di Lollo, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 24, 1454- 1466, 1998). We tested the hypothesis that Giesbrecht & Di Lollo's findings were vitiated by ceiling constraints arising from either response scale (...) (experiment 1) or data limitations (experiment 2). In experiment 1, digitdistractors were replaced with pseudoletters to increase task difficulty, bringing performance below ceiling. An AB occurred without backward masking of T2. In experiment 2, a ceiling-free procedure estimated the number of noise dots needed for 80% T2 identification. An AB was revealed: fewer noise dots were required during the AB period than outside it. Both outcomes confirm that an AB can be obtained without either masking of T2 or task switching. (shrink)

A major flaw of the book is its failure to note Wittgenstein’s role in destroying the mechanical or reductionist or computationalist view of mind. These continue to dominate cognitive science and philosophy in spite of the fact that they were powerfully countered by W and later by Searle and others. -/- There is much talk of W’s use of terms like “grammar”, “rules” etc but never a clear mention that they mean our Evolved Psychology or our genetically programmed innate (...) behavior. There are references to Baker and Hacker's works and to Budd, but none to many standard W refs such as ter Hark, Johnston, and especially to the searchable Intelex CDROM of his complete works, nor to Searle, and none to the vast literature of EP. -/- Many sections of the book are reasonably successful in describing W’s work but there is much aimless wandering and many mistakes and confusions. These will hopefully be obvious to those who read the above and my other reviews as I cannot recount more than a few of the hundreds of critical comments I made in my two readings of this book. A major flaw, common to most writing in the behavioral sciences, is the lack of awareness of the S1/S2 two selves mode of describing personality that W pioneered (though nobody noticed) and a failure to be clear about nature/nuture issues. The fast automatic perceptions, ‘rules’ and behaviors of S1 are mushed together with the slow conscious dispositional thinking, believing and rule following of S2 and neither are clearly or consistently distinguished from the arbitrary cultural behaviors of S3. -/- I wrote this review several years ago and since then my ideas have evolved considerably. Eventually I may revise this but for now the interested reader may consult my many more recent reviews and articles, especially “ The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language as Revealed in Wittgenstein and Searle” 80p (2016). Briefly, I now see that virtually all authors failed to give Wittgenstein’s last work “On Certainty” the prominent position it deserves and likewise failed to take advantage of the powerful dual systems of thought framework. Nor have they adopted the useful extensions of Wittgenstein’s work made by John Searle. So I first lay out a framework and then provide some detailed comments. -/- This is a reasonable first attempt to bring W’s pioneering work on higher order thought to the attention of psychology but it has many failings and needs a thorough rewrite. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019). (shrink)

Jonardon Ganeri presents a radically reoriented account of mind, to which attention is the key. It is attention, not self, that explains the experiential and normative situatedness of humans in the world. Ganeri draws together three disciplines: analytic philosophy and phenomenology, cognitive science and psychology, and Buddhist thought.

According to commonsense psychology, one is conscious of everything that one pays attention to, but one does not pay attention to all the things that one is conscious of. Recent lines of research purport to show that commonsense is mistaken on both of these points: Mack and Rock (1998) tell us that attention is necessary for consciousness, while Kentridge and Heywood (2001) claim that consciousness is not necessary for attention. If these lines of research were (...) successful they would have important implications regarding the prospects of using attention research to inform us about consciousness. The present essay shows that these lines of research are not successful, and that the commonsense picture of the relationship between attention and consciousness can be. (shrink)

We present an account of the evolutionary development of the experiences of empathy that marked the beginning of morality and art. We argue that aesthetic and moral capacities provided an important foundation for later epistemic developments. The distinction between phenomenal consciousness and attention is discussed, and a role for phenomenology in cognitive archeology is justified-critical sources of evidence used in our analysis are based on the archeological record. We claim that what made our species unique was a form of (...) meditative and empathic thinking that made large-scale human cooperation possible through pre-linguistic, empathic communication. A critical aspect of this proposal is that the transformation that led to the dawn of our species was not initially driven by semantic or epistemic factors, although clearly, these factors increased the gap between us and other species dramatically later on. Our proposal suggests that recent philosophy of mind and psychology might have "epistemicized" phenomenal consciousness too much by construing it in terms of semantic content rather than by describing it in terms of empathic and meditative thinking. Instead of the prevailing approach, we favor the type of subjectivity that is fundamentally "other-involving" as essential, because on our account, a necessary condition for subjectivity is the empathic understanding of other individuals' psychology, not through inference or judgment, but through immediate conscious engagement. (shrink)

This chapter argues that attention is a distinctive mode of consciousness, which plays an essential functional role in making information accessible for use in the rational control of thought and action. The main line of argument can be stated quite simply. Attention is what makes information fully accessible for use in the rational control of thought and action. But what makes information fully accessible for use in the rational control of thought and action is a distinctive mode of (...) consciousness. Therefore, attention is a distinctive mode of consciousness. In a slogan: attention is rational-access consciousness. (shrink)

What is the role of attention in the dialectics of memory and communication? How far is attention functioning as a medium? Which role does attention play in the information management practices? Attention is not only fundamental to human existence but also to the process of understanding. If understanding is mediated by memory and communication then attention can be identified with the medium. So whenever you search to explain the role and mechanisms of memory in the (...) information society, the question of attention is asked immediately. Furthermore, attention can be analyzed under the following topics: as cognitive process, as subjective, intersubjective and cultural phenomenon, and as resource and medium within an 'Attention Economy'. Whereas the first aspect has to be seen in the context of empirical studies in psychology and cognitive sciences, the phenomenological, cultural, and economic aspects seem to have common points and similar implications in their theoretical approaches. In the last twenty years, the notion of attention has been the central core of several discourses in German phenomenology, economy and cultural studies. Similar to Georg Franck's theory of mental capitalism, the idea of an attention economy also was followed up in the American discourse. This article is supposed to explore the role of attention and its function as a medium within communication, cultural memory and science. (shrink)

Remembering that there’s a difference between intellectual and perceptual attention can help us avoid miscommunication due to meaning different things by the same terms, which has been a particular problem during the last hundred years or so of the study of attention. I demonstrate this through analyzing in depth one such miscommunication that occurred in a philosophical criticism of the influential psychological text, Inattentional Blindness. But after making the distinction between perceptual attention and intellectual attention, and (...) after making an effort to keep this distinction in mind, we are still faced with the problem of specifying what makes intellectual attention distinct from perceptual attention. In the second half of this article, I discuss the range of proposals about how to understand intellectual attention that are present in the literature, and the problems with them. I do this with the aim of stimulating further discussion about how best to conceptualize intellectual attention, although I do not settle that further question within this paper. (shrink)

In this paper I criticize theory-biased and overly individualist approaches to understanding others and introduce the PAIR account of joint attention as a pragmatic, affectively charged intentional relation. I argue that this relation obtains in virtue of intentional contents in the minds of the co-attenders, and – against the received understanding of intentional states as propositional attitudes – that we should recognize what I call “subject mode” and “position mode” intentional content. Based on findings from developmental psychology, I (...) propose that subject mode content represents the co-attenders as co-subjects, who are like them and who are at least disposed to act jointly with them. I conclude by arguing that in joint attention we experience and understand affective, actional and perceptual relations at a non-conceptual level prior to the differentiation of mind and body. (shrink)

Suppose we grant that evolutionary forces have had a profound effect on the contours of our normative judgments and intuitions. Can we conclude anything from this about the correct metaethical theory? I argue that, for the most part, we cannot. Focusing my attention on Sharon Street’s justly famous argument that the evolutionary origins of our normative judgments and intuitions cause insuperable epistemological difficulties for a metaethical view she calls "normative realism," I argue that there are two largely independent lines (...) of argument in Street’s work which need to be teased apart. The first of these involves a genuine appeal to evolutionary considerations, but it can fairly easily be met by her opponents. The second line of argument is more troubling; it raises a significant problem, one of the most difficult in all of philosophy, namely how to justify our reliance on our most basic cognitive faculties without relying on those same faculties in a question-begging manner. However, evolutionary considerations add little to this old problem, and rejecting normative realism is not a way to solve it. (shrink)

I suggest that the recent, highly visible, and often heated debate over failures to replicate the results in the social sciences reveals more than the need for greater attention to the pragmatics and value of empirical falsification. It also is a symptom of a serious issue -- the underdeveloped state of theory in many areas of psychology. While I focus on the phenomenon of “social priming” -- since it figures centrally in current debate -- it is not the (...) only area of psychological inquiry to which my critique applies. I first discuss some of the key issues in the “social priming” debate and then attempt to show that many of the problems thus far identified are traceable to a lack of specificity of theory. Finally, I hint at the possibility that adherence to the materialist tenets of modern psychological theory may have a limiting effect on our full appreciation of the phenomena under scrutiny. (shrink)

Sometimes, a form of discrimination is hard to register, understand, and articulate. A rich precedent demonstrates how victim testimonies have been key in uncovering such ‘hidden’ forms of discrimination, from sexual harassment to microaggressions. I reflect on how this plausibly goes too for a new hypothesised form of ‘attentional discrimination’, referring to cases where the more meaningful attributes of one social group are made salient in attention in contrast to the less meaningful attributes of another. Victim testimonies understandably dominate (...) the ‘context-of-discovery’ stage of research into these initially opaque forms of discrimination; a victim’s encounter with the gap between their experience and dominant conceptual frameworks for understanding it is what provides an initial foothold for analysis to begin. Some object, however, to this methodology continuing to dominate the later ‘context-of-justification’ stage, where the hypothesis is rigorously challenged. I argue that this objection underestimates not just how other methodologies are more likely to inherit the various mechanisms of invisibility hiding the discrimination in question, but also how victim testimonies are distinctively well-suited to recognise and challenge those mechanisms. Victim testimonies, then, ought to continue playing a dominant role into these later stages of research into hidden forms of discrimination. (shrink)

I argue that appreciation of the phenomenon of forgetting requires serious attention to its origins and place in nature. This, in turn, necessitates metaphysical inquiry as well as empirical backing – a combination likely to be eschewed by psychological orthodoxy. But, if we hope to avoid the conceptual vacuity that characterizes too much of contemporary psychological inquiry (e.g., Klein, 2012, 2014a, 2015a, 2016a), a “big picture” approach to phenomena of interest is essential. Adopting this investigative posture turns the “received (...) view” of the relation between remembering and forgetting on its head: Rather than treated as the result of breakdowns and limitations of biologically engineered systems of remembering, forgetting is accorded elevated status as the driving force behind the evolution of organic systems of information retention. (shrink)

Recent years have seen growing public concern about the effects of persuasive digital technologies on public mental health and well-being. As the draws on our attention reach such staggering scales and as our ability to focus our attention on our own considered ends erodes ever further, the need to understand and articulate what is at stake has become pressing. In this ethical viewpoint, we explore the concept of attentional harms and emphasize their potential seriousness. We further argue that (...) the acknowledgment of these harms has relevance for evolving debates on digital inequalities. An underdiscussed aspect of web-based inequality concerns the persuasions, and even the manipulations, that help to generate sustained attentional loss. These inequalities are poised to grow, and as they do, so will concerns about justice with regard to the psychological and self-regulatory burdens of web-based participation for different internet users. In line with calls for multidimensional approaches to digital inequalities, it is important to recognize these potential harms as well as to empower internet users against them even while expanding high-quality access. (shrink)

Our visual experience of the world is one of diverse objects and events, each with particular colors, shapes, and motions. This experience is so coherent, so immediate, and so effortless that it seems to result from a single system that lets us experience everything in our field of view. But however appealing, this belief is mistaken: there are severe limits on what can be visually experienced. -/- For example, in a display for air-traffic control it is important to track all (...) moving items. For a single item, this can be done without problem. Three or four can also be tracked, although some degree of effort may be needed. As the number is increased further, accurate tracking becomes more and more difficult—and eventually, impossible. Performance is evidently affected by a factor within the observer which enables certain kinds of perception to occur, but is limited in some way. This factor is generally referred to as attention. -/- At various times, attention has been associated with clarity of perception, intensity of perception, consciousness, selection, or the allocation of a limited “resource” enabling various operations (see Hatfield, 1998). During the past several decades, considerable progress has been achieved by focusing on the idea of selection (Broadbent, 1982). In particular, attention can be productively viewed as contingently selective processing. This can be embodied in various ways by various processes—there need not be a single quantity identified with all forms of attention, or a single site where it operates (Allport, 1993; Tsotsos, 2011). Although “paying attention” is often considered to be a unitary operation, it may simply refer to the control of one or more selective processes, ideally in a co-ordinated way. While this view has some cost in terms of conceptual simplicity, it can help make sense of a large set of phenomena. -/- This article surveys several of the major issues in our understanding of attention and how it relates to perception. It focuses on vision, since many—if not all—considerations are similar for all sensory modalities, and the level of understanding achieved in this domain is currently the most advanced. (shrink)

Attention, for Iris Murdoch, is a central concept in more than one sense. On the one hand, it appears to be one of the keys, if not the key, to goodness, the task of the moral subject, and the pre-requisite for right action. On the other, attention can function as the hinge around which Murdoch’s general ethical worldview (including psychology and metaphysics) can be made to revolve, and through which it turns away from the mainstream contemporary philosophy (...) of her time. Overwhelmingly inspired by Simone Weil, Murdoch presents attention as a truth-seeing and truth-discovering attitude and activity, animated by Platonic eros. (shrink)