Attention

First published Tue Sep 8, 2009; substantive revision Tue Oct 26, 2021

Attention is involved in the selective directedness of our mentallives. The nature of this selectivity is one of the principal pointsof disagreement between the extant theories of attention. Some of themost influential theories treat the selectivity of attention asresulting from limitations in the brain’s capacity to processthe complex properties of multiple perceivable stimuli. Other theoriestake the selectivity of attention to be the result of limitations inthe thinking subject’s capacity to consciously entertainmultiple trains of thought. A third group attempt to account forattention’s selectivity in ways that need not make any referenceto limitations in capacity. These latter theories relate theselectivity of attention to the selectivity required to maintain asingle coherent course of action, to the weighting of sensoryinformation in accordance with its expected precision, or tocompetition between mutually inhibitory streams of processing.

The instances of attention differ along several dimensions ofvariation. In some of its instances attention is aperceptualphenomenon. In other instances it is a phenomenon related toaction. In some instances the selectivity of attention isvoluntary. In other instances it is driven, quiteindependently of the subject’s volition, by the high salience ofattention-grabbing items in the perceptual field. The difficulty ofgiving a unified theory of attention that applies to attention’svoluntary and involuntary instances, and to its perceptual andenactive instances, makes attention a topic of philosophical interestin its own right.

Attention is also a topic of philosophical interest because of itsapparent relations to a number of other philosophically puzzlingphenomena. There are empirical and theoretical considerationssuggesting that attention is closely related toconsciousness, and there are controversies over whether thisrelationship is one of necessity, or sufficiency (or both or neither).There are also controversies – thought to be important to theviability of representationism about consciousness – over theways in which the phenomenal character of a conscious experience canbe modulated by attention. Different considerations link attention todemonstrative reference, to the development of anunderstanding ofother minds, and to the exercise of thewill. Some work in the tradition of virtue ethics takesattention to bemorally important, since there are at leastsome virtues that require one to attend appropriately. Attention hasalso been given a prominent role in some theories about the epistemicsignificance ofemotion, and in some discussions of theepistemic peculiarities of self-attributed mental states.

The controversies concerning attention’s relation to these otherphenomena often include debates about the philosophical significanceof theories that have been developed through the empirical study ofattention at the neuropsychological and cognitive levels.Attention’s cultural and economic aspects have also become apoint of philosophical interest, with some theorists suggesting thatthe social significance of new media is primarily a consequence of thenovel ways in which those media engage and compete for ourattention.

1. Historical Overview

1.1 Descartes: Attention and Epistemology

In the early modern period a variety of explanatory roles wereassigned to attention by a number of different writers.Descartes’Meditations provides one prominent example.The result of Descartes’ First Meditation—that everythingcan be doubted—is in apparent tension with his ThirdMeditation’s claim that clear and distinct ideas are beyonddoubt. Descartes introduces a claim about attention to resolve thisapparent conflict. He says, in reply to the seventh set of objections,that it is only when we pay attention to them that clear and distinctideas provide a place where doubt does not take hold:

So long as we attend to a truth which we perceive very clearly, wecannot doubt it. But when, as often happens, we are not attending toany truth in this way, then even though we remember that we havepreviously perceived many things clearly, nevertheless there will benothing which we may not justly doubt so long as we do not know thatwhatever we clearly perceive is true. (‘Replies toObjections’, 309)

This passage is usually cited for the point that it makes aboutmemory, but the picture that Descartes is here outlining is also onein which attention has an important epistemic role to play: clarityand distinctness realize their epistemic potential only when attentionis being paid to the ideas that have them. Those ideas can be doubted,as, in accordance with the policy of the First Meditation they mustbe, but that doubt cannot be maintained by a properly attentivethinker. The crucial first move in Descartes’epistemology—the move from radical doubt to certainty about thetruth of particular clear and distinct ideas—is, therefore, atransition that is mediated by attention.

1.2 Berkeley: Attention and Abstraction

A quite different explanatory role is assigned to attention in BishopBerkeley’sPrinciples of Human Knowledge, although hereagain we find that it is in order to remove an epistemological glitchthat the notion of attention is brought in. In the Introduction toPrinciples of Human Knowledge Berkeley rejects Locke’sclaim that there exist such things as Abstract Ideas. But Berkeleyretains Locke’s commitment to the core empiricist claim that thethinking of thoughts is always a matter of handling ideas receivedfrom experience. This would seem to lead to the conclusion that it isnot possible to think about abstractia, but Berkeley realizes thatthat conclusion is unacceptable. It is, as he says, perfectly possibleto think about the properties of triangles in general.

In the second edition of thePrinciples Berkeley added acouple of sentences to the Introduction that make it clear that it isattention and, in particular, the withholding of attention, that issupposed to explain the possibility of thinking about abstractiawithout the need to postulate Abstract Ideas. These added sentencestell us that:

[It] must be acknowledged thata man may consider a figure merelyas triangular, without attending to the particular qualities of theangles or relations of the sides. So far he may abstract, butthis will never prove that he can frame an abstract general,inconsistent idea of a triangle. (1710, Introduction to 2nd edn.§16. emphasis added)

In these sentences Berkeley is not attempting to elaborate a theory ofattention. He says nothing more about the idea that attention mightenable thought about abstractia. It is nonetheless clear that herequires attention to play an important role in his picture of themind.

Berkeley’s idea that attention and abstraction are linked wastaken up in the second half of the nineteenth century by WilliamHamilton. Hamilton did not, however, think that the link betweenattention and abstraction provided the starting point for anexplanation of attention, nor of abstraction. That is because he tookit that the relationship between the two phenomena was too intimate tobe explanatory. He writes that:

Attention and Abstraction are only the same process viewed indifferent relations. They are, as it were, the positive and negativepoles of the same act. (1876, 88)

1.3 Locke: Attention as a Mode of Thought

Descartes and Berkeley treat attention very briefly, but each assignsattention to a particular explanatory role. Locke’s treatment ofattention is also brief, but he has his own theory of the explanatoryrole that attention plays, and goes further than either Descartes orBerkeley in giving us a positive account of what attention is. Hisaccount is given as part of the catalogue of ‘Modes ofThinking’, which Locke sets out towards the beginning of ChapterNineteen of Book Two of theEssay Concerning HumanUnderstanding:

[W]hen ideas float in our mind without any reflection or regard of theunderstanding, it is that which the French call reverie; our languagehas scarce a name for it:when the ideas that offer themselves(for, as I have observed in another place, whilst we are awake, therewill always be a train of ideas succeeding one another in our minds)are taken notice of, and, as it were, registered in the memory, it isattention: when the mind with great earnestness, and of choice,fixes its view on any idea, considers it on all sides, and will not becalled off by the ordinary solicitation of other ideas, it is that wecall “intention,” or “study.” (1689, II, 19§1 emphasis added)

In addition to providing these quick theories of‘reverie’, ‘attention’ and ‘intention orstudy’, the very same sentence of Locke’sEssayprovides theories of ‘remembrance’,‘recollection’, ‘contemplation’,‘sleep’, ‘dreaming’, and‘ecstasy’. It is significant that Locke’s account ofattention is given so briefly, and that it goes by as part of a crowdof theories of these various other mental phenomena. Locke is not hereengaging in an uncharacteristically slapdash piece of rapid-firetheorizing. His intention in going through this catalogue is toestablish that these are topics for which no new substantive theory isneeded. These are, in Locke’s theory, simply ‘modes ofthinking’: ‘reverie’, ‘study’ etc. arenot names for independent phenomena, existing in their own right.Instead they are the various names that thinking is given when ittakes place in various ways.

One consequence of Locke’s treatment of attention as a mode ofthinking is that, once we have a theory of thinking before us, we needno further theory to account for the possibility of attention,contemplation, study, etc. (Just as, to use the classic example of‘modes’, we need no substantive independent theory, oncewe have a theory of walking, to explain the possibility of limping,pacing or ambling.) We need to saysomething in giving ananalysis of the nature of modes, but—once thething-to-be-modified has been accounted for—our analysis cansimply say something brief, along the lines indicated by Locke. We donot need to give a theory that postulates any substances or processesspecific to the explanation of attention.

Locke’s modal view of attention has the consequence that no verysubstantive theory of attention is needed once our theory of thinkingis in place. It also entails, and for the same reason, that attentioncannot figure in the explanation of how thinking itself is possible(for any explanation in which it did figure would be analogous to anexplanation of walking that takes strolling to already be possible; itwould get its explanatory priorities backwards).

1.4 The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Attention in Perception, in Action and in Reflective Thought

Locke viewed attention as an explanatorily slight phenomenon—amode of thought that is not in need of much explanation, nor capableof providing much. Theories of attention moved away from that viewover the course of the eighteenth century. Attention was increasinglytreated as a phenomenon with explanatory work to do, and so as aphenomenon for which a substantive independent theory needed to begiven. The attempt to provide such a theory got properly underway in1738, when Christian Wolff’s textbook on psychology was thefirst to devote a whole chapter to the topic of attention (seeHatfield, 1995, for an excellent discussion).

During this period the explanatory remit for theories of attentionbroadened in two directions. The first move was away from the ideathat attention acts on already-received ideas and towards the ideathat attention is involved in the initial reception of those ideas.Locke had characterized attention as the registration ofalready-received ideas into memory. But by 1769, when Henry Home Kamesadded the appendix of ‘Terms Defined or Explained’ to hisElements of Criticism, attention’s role as a regulatorof cognitive input was regarded as definitive of it:

Attention is that state of mind which prepares one to receiveimpressions. According to the degree of attention objects make astrong or weak impression. Attention is requisite even to the simpleact of seeing. (1769, 18)

As well as beginning to assign to attention a role in the explanationof the reception of ideas, eighteenth century theories also movedtowards including a role for attention in the production ofbehaviour. This is particularly clear in DugaldStewart’s 1792Elements of the Philosophy of the HumanMind. Stewart retains Locke’s view that attention has anessential role to play in determining which things get stored inmemory. He adds to that view the claim that attention has a role indetermining which particular memories get recalled, writing that“Some attention [is] necessary for any act of memorywhatever.” (1792, 53). Stewart also claims that attention has arole in the explanation of the development and deployment of at leastsome skilled behaviours. The example that Stewart gives here is thatof “the dexterity of jugglers” which, he says,“merits a greater degree of attention from philosophers than ithas yet attracted” (62).

In the century between Locke’sEssay andStewart’sElements, then, attention ceases to be seenmerely as a certain mode of idea-handling, and comes to be seen as aphenomenon in need of its own explanation, and with a role to play inthe explanation of perception, in the explanation of skilled action,and in the explanation of memory (both in its storage and in itsrecall).

In the century after Stewart’sElements the diversityamong the phenomena that attention was expected to explain continuedto grow, and it continued to include phenomena from across thepsychological spectrum from perception, to thought, to action. By theend of the nineteenth century, in what was a crucial period in thedevelopment of scientific psychology, there were some psychologists,such as E.B. Titchener, who took the role of attention in perceptionand in ‘sensory clearness’ to be its most essentialfeature (see Titchener, 1908, 1910); others, such as Alexander Bain,who thought that the essential feature of attention was its role inaction, (Bain, 1888); and a third group, of whom G.F. Stout was themost prominent example, who argued that the primary job for a theoryof attention was to explain attention’s role in reflectivethought (see Stout, 1891).

As a result of this diversity in their conceptions ofattention’s explanatory remit (and as a result of the lack ofany established methodology for empirical psychology) the debatesbetween exponents of these various psychological theories of attentiongot themselves into what was acknowledged to be a ‘chaoticstate’ (Pillsbury, 1906).

1.5 William James and His Contemporaries: Deflationary Theories

The diversity of explanatory roles assigned to attention in theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries meant that theorizing aboutattention at the end of the nineteenth century was in a chaotic state.The ambition for theorists of attention writing at the end of thenineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries was to getthis chaos into order. The theories of attention proposed in thisperiod therefore tended to take the form of attempts to revealattention as something less mysterious and less complex than earlierwriters had supposed. This ambition to give a ‘nothingbut…’ reduction of attention can be seen in the mostinfluential work from this period: William James’ThePrinciples of Psychology (1890).

One aspect of James’ approach is to play down the more complexperceptual aspects of attention. His chapter on attention includes adiscussion of experiments into what we now call‘subitizing’—that is, into the ability to perceivethe cardinality of small stimulus sets without needing to count theirmembers—but James writes of these experiments that it “isobvious that such observations decide nothing at all about ourattention, properly so called” (407).

Although James plays down attention’s role in complex perceptualphenomena, he does assign attention to an important explanatory rolein the production of behaviour. He claims, for example, that‘Volition is nothing but attention’ (424). But when Jamesmakes such claims it is as part of a general project that seeks alwaysto be deflationary where possible. When James associates attentionwith volition it is as a way of suggesting how volition could be givena deflationary treatment, not as a way of inflating attention’sexplanatory role.

This deflationary approach to attention’s explanatory remitmeans that, when it comes to giving an account of the ‘intimatenature of the attention process’, James can identify two fairlysimple processes which, he claims, ‘probably coexist in all ourconcrete attentive acts’. and which ‘possibly form incombination a complete reply’ to the question ofattention’s ‘intimate nature’ (1890, 411). Theprocesses that James identifies are:

The accommodation or adjustment of the sensory organs, and
The anticipatory preparation from within of the ideational centresconcerned with the object to which attention is paid. (411)

The first of these processes is reasonably familiar. By ‘theaccommodation or adjustment of the sensory organs’ James meanssuch processes as pointing one’s ears in the right direction,bringing one’s eyes into focus, taking a sniff, and so on.

James’s talk of ‘anticipatory preparation’ of‘ideation centres’ is a little less clear, but the pointis again a quite straightforward one. What James has in mind here issimplyimagination. His claim is that when attention does notinvolve adjusting one’s sense organs it consists in imaginingthe things or actions that one is attending to, or looking for.

James illustrates his claim about attention’s link toimagination with an example from Hermann von Helmholtz. This exampleis an important one for James, and it illustrates some importantfeatures of attention that subsequent theorists have tended toneglect. The example involves the variety of attention that needs tobe paid when trying to discern the overtones in a note played on thepiano. Helmholtz asks us to sit at the piano and to play a G, then,imagining the sound that we have just heard, to play a low C. Doingthis, it is claimed, enables one to hear that G is discernibly there(as the third overtone) within the sound produced when C is played.Helmholtz’s claim, which James endorses, is that the kind ofattention that is paid when listening for an overtone is constitutedby the imagining of what that overtone would sound like. James goesonto claim that there is a wide range of cases in which payingattention to what one is doing consists in this same sort ofpreparatory imaginative engagement.

Here, as in his more frequently discussed treatment of emotion, it isdistinctive of James’s approach that he tries to account for alarge-scale personal-level psychological phenomenon in a realist butsomewhat revisionary way, so as to be able to give his account usingrelatively simple and unmysterious explanatory resources. Analternative deflationary approach—one which James explicitlycontrasted with his own—is the approach taken in 1886 by F.H.Bradley.

Bradley advocated a view according to which attention is not the sortof phenomenon for which an independent and substantive theory can orneeds to be given. Bradley does not develop this point in much detail,and it is a point on which he would later change his mind, but in his1886 article, ‘Is there a special activity of attention?’,Bradley was concerned with arguing that a project such asJames’s one of identifying particular processes as theattention-constituting ones was wrongheaded. He claims that noparticular attention-processes can be identified since:

Any function whatever of the body or the mind will be active attentionif it is prompted by an interest and brings about the result of ourengrossment with its product. There is no primary act of attention,there is no specific act of attention, there is no one kind of act ofattention at all. (1886, 316)

Although Bradley does not use the Lockean vocabulary (and althoughJames himself does not seem to have taken Bradley in this way),Bradley’s position here has much in common with Locke’sclaim that attention is amode. Bradley’s position,like Locke’s, is that what is essential to an instance ofattention is not the matter ofwhich processes are takingplace, but the facts abouthow the things that happen happen.He therefore takes the ennumeration of processes to be the wrong formfor a theory of attention to take.

Other writers who were contemporary with Bradley and James tookdifferent approaches to the project of giving a deflationaryexplanation of attention. In Théodule Ribot’s 1888 bookLa Psychologie De L’Attention the attempt to explainattention took an approach that we would now classify as behaviourist.In 1888 behaviourism had not yet been established as a generalapproach in philosophical or psychological theories of the mind, butRibot’s suggestion that attention’s behaviouralmanifestations are essential to it is nonetheless recognizable as anearly articulation of behaviourism in a strong form:

Are the movements of the face, the body, and the limbs and therespiratory modifications that accompany attention, simple effects,outward marks, as is usually supposed? Or are they, on the contrary,the necessary conditions, the constituent elements, theindispensable factors of attention? Without hesitation we acceptthe second thesis. (1888, 19)

A somewhat more moderate version of this behaviour-centred approachwas taken by Alexander Bain, who identified attention, not with itsbehavioural manifestations themselves, but with truncated versions ofthe motor-control processes that typically bring about thosebehavioural manifestations: processes ‘stopping short of theactual movement performed by the organ’ (Bain, 1888, 371). Muchas Ribot’s view can be seen as an early version of behaviourism,Bain’s view can be seen as an early version of the motor-basedapproaches to attention that can be found in the literature of thepresent century (seeSection 2.8 below).

1.6 The Twentieth Century: Locating Attention at a Bottleneck in Information Processing

The variety among the deflationary explanatory approaches thatcharacterized the theories of attention offered in the nineteenthcentury gave way in the early twentieth century to a period in whichone such explanatory tactic was dominant: the tactic of behaviourism.Behaviourists tended to neglect attention, but did not ignore itentirely. John Dashiell’s 1928Fundamentals of ObjectivePsychology, for example, is a behaviourist work that attempts toaccount for attention “as a form of posturing” (Ch. 10,§3). The project of identifying a behaviour with which to explainattention was, nonetheless, an understandably unpopular one. AsGilbert Ryle notes, it is not only attention, but also ‘heedconcepts’ more generally, that resist simple behaviouristanalysis:

[W]hen a man is described as driving carefully, whistling withconcentration or eating absent-mindedly the special character of hisactivity seem to elude the observer, the camera and the Dictaphone.Perhaps knitted brows, taciturnity and fixed gaze may be evidence ofintentness; but these can be simulated, or they can be purelyhabitual. (1949, 133)

In the middle of the twentieth century behaviourism’s dominancewaned, cognitive psychology established itself, and a new theoreticalapproach to the explanation of attention was developed. These threedevelopments were intimately related to one another. Instrumental toall three was the publication in 1958 of Donald Broadbent’sPerception and Communication.

The year prior toPerception and Communication’spublication had seen B.F. Skinner’s attempt, inVerbalBehaviour (1957), to apply a behaviourist explanatory approach todistinctively human aspects of cognition. Skinner’s project inthat book failed, and Noam Chomsky’s famous 1959 review of thebook made its failure conspicuous. Chomsky’s own work inSyntactic Structures (1957) went some way towardsestablishing the new cognitive paradigm for psychology by showing howinternal processing could be theorized by describing transformationson representations in abstraction from the question of how thoserepresentations were realized. Donald Broadbent’s distinctivecontribution to the overthrow of behaviourism was to show how the movefrom behavioural data to the postulation of a particular cognitivearchitecture could be disciplined by the then-new strategy ofimporting into psychology the intellectual resources used in thinkingabout information technology. The year in which Broadbent’s bookwas published was an important year for the development of suchtechnologies, being the year in which (inter alia) the integratedcircuit chip was invented (see Mole, 2012). It was also the year inwhich Subscriber Trunk Dialling was introduced to UK telephoneexchanges. The technology of the telephone exchange was what mostnaturally suggested itself as a metaphor for attention at the timewhen Broadbent was writing.

Towards the end ofPerception and Communication Broadbentexplicitly sets out the claim that the theoretical resources developedin thinking about the transmission of information through telephoneexchanges provide the basis for an alternative to behaviourism. Healso attacks the positivistic methodological principles that had givenmany behaviourists their motivation. But the central lesson fromBroadbent’s work, so far as the theory of attention goes, is alesson that he takes to be independent of this attack on behaviourismand its positivist foundations. At an early stage inPerceptionand Communication he remarks that:

Perhaps the point of permanent value which will remain in psychologyif the fashion for communication theory wanes, will be the emphasis onproblems of capacity. […] The fact that any given channel has alimit is a matter of central importance to communication engineers,and it is correspondingly forced on the attention of psychologists whouse their terms. (1958, 5)

This introduction of the notion of capacity limitations intodiscussions of perception and attention was, as Broadbent herepredicted, hugely and permanently influential.

Broadbent claimed not only that the human brain is subject to capacitylimitations of the sort that communications engineers had learnt totheorize, he claimed also that these limitations are clustered so thatthere is a single bottleneck in capacity that is especially criticalto the brain’s handling of perceptual information. Thisbottleneck was said to occur at the junction of two systems operatingin series, with the first system having a large capacity forinformation processing, and operating automatically on all of thestimuli with which the perceiving subject is presented, while thesecond has a much smaller capacity, and therefore needs to be deployedselectively.

Those who followed Broadbent took it that the bottleneck that resultsfrom the connection of these two systems corresponds to attention inthe sense that, when a representation of a stimulus passes throughthat bottleneck, the stimulusipso facto counts as one towhich attention has been paid.

Broadbent himself was cautious about presenting his claims aboutcapacity-bottlenecks as a theory of attention. The word‘attention’ occurs rarely inPerception andCommunication. Broadbent’s later book,Decision andStress (1971), does describe his earlier experiments as‘studies of attention’, but here too Broadbent prefers totalk about ‘selective perception’ (chapter V) or‘vigilance’ (chapters II and III). In an article from1982, entitled, ‘Task Combination and Selective Intake ofInformation’, he admits that: “The topic of this paper isone that is often termed ‘attention’, and it may seemunduly artificial to have given it a more cumbrous title.” Buthe goes on to reassert his qualms:

‘Attention’ is a word in ordinary language, that canreasonably be used as a label for experiments in a particular area.Yet it has also been used as a theoretical concept, a mysterious assetor energy which is sometimes attached to human functions and sometimesnot. This use of attention […] is not very helpful, andavoiding the word in the title is a step towards clarity. (1982, 253)

When Broadbent does use the word ‘attention’ it is mostlyin discussions of attentionshifting. His view, at least inhis early work, seems to have been that where there is a bottleneck inour information processing capacity there need to be additionalmechanisms that control how our limited capacity resources will bedeployed. These additional mechanisms of bottleneck-controlseem to have been what Broadbent thought of as the attentionmechanisms. He never took himself to have given a theory of them, onlyto have given a theory of where they would be needed. Nor were thesemechanisms the topic that was at issue in the debates about attentionthat Broadbent prompted. Those debates were concerned with questionsabout the nature and location of the bottleneck itself, not about thefactors that determine what, on any particular occasion, gets to passthrough it.

In the decades following Broadbent a great many psychologists devotedthemselves to the task of locating the attentional bottleneck that hehad postulated. Almost all psychologists writing at this time wereguided to some degree by Broadbent’stwo-serial-systems-and-a-bottleneck picture of perceptual processing.The question of whether a given task is attention demanding wastherefore understood to depend on the question of whether theperformance of that task requires the engagement of the small-capacitysystem that comes after the bottleneck of attention. Researchinto the attention-related demands of particular tasks thereforebecame another route by which to approach the issue of where theattentional bottleneck is located. Broadbent’stwo-systems-and-a-bottleneck model was frequently questioned, but formost research into attention in the second half of the twentiethcentury it was very much the orthodox view. This has now changed. Inpsychology’s current paradigm, only a few aspects ofBroadbent’s picture remain orthodox.

2. Theories of Attention

2.1 Capacity-Limitation Theories

Psychologists attempting to produce a theory of attention in thenineteen sixties and seventies were highly influenced by DonaldBroadbent’s picture of attention as corresponding to abottleneck in information processing capacity resulting from theconnection of two separate perceptual processing systems. The firstpiece of business for these psychologists was to locate thisattentional bottleneck, by determining which sorts of processing aredone by the large capacity, pre-bottleneck system, and which by thesmall capacity, post-bottleneck system. Debates between thesepsychologists gave rise to various theories in which the selectivityof attention was characterized with a claim about the location of thisbottleneck.

2.1.1 Early Selection Theory

Broadbent’s own account of the distribution of processingbetween the pre-attentional system and the post-attentional systemdefines the ‘early selection’ theory of attention. Heclaimed that only very simple properties are detected by the largecapacity system, and that any semantic properties, or any propertiesrelating to the particularidentity of a stimulus, aredetected only after representations of the stimulus have passedthrough the attentional-bottleneck and into the smaller capacitysystem.

The personal-level consequences of this early selection theory arethat we can recognize what things are and what they mean only if weare paying attention to them, but can detect the simple physicalproperties of things even when paying no attention to them. The theorycan be thought of as a communication-theoretic rendering of twointuitive ideas, which Broadbent’s own research had put on anempirically sound footing. The first is that one has no immediatecontrol over one’s awareness of simple features of one’senvironment, such as the fact that there are people talking in thenext room. Whatever one is paying attention to, one will continue tohear some chatter to be going on, if any is. The second idea is thatthe details of things—such as the semantic content of thatchatter—can be detected only for the one or two things to whichone is paying attention: If one wants to know what the chatter isabout, one has to listen, and this involves disengaging one’sattention from other things that might be happening.

The early selection theory also entails, more problematically, thatthe semantic properties of an unattended item must remainunrepresented in the nervous system, and so entails that thoseproperties can have no psychological effects. According to this viewthe semantic features of unattended items cannot explain why thoseitems attract attention to themselves, on the occasions when they do.It was to this aspect of the theory that its opponents most frequentlyobjected.

2.1.2 Late Selection Theory

The chief rivals of Broadbent’s early selection theory were the‘late selectionists’, who claimed that all (or almost all)perceivable properties are detected automatically, by a large capacitysystem that operates on all of the stimuli with which the perceivingsubject is presented. According to this late selection theory ofattention the consequences of passing through the bottleneck ofattention into the post-attentive small capacity system are only (1)that the subject comes to be conscious of the contents that the largecapacity system has already succeeded in encoding and (2) that thosecontents come to be stored in working memory (Deutsch and Deutsch,1963).

Although it was originally proposed against the background ofBroadbent’s now superseded theoretical framework, it would betoo quick to dismiss the late selection theory as an obsolete one. Thetheory has much in common with some plausible and empiricallywell-supported views found in the more recent literature. Jesse Prinz,for example, shares the late selectionists’ view thatattention’s primary role is not in managing limited perceptualprocessing resources, but in projecting already-processedrepresentations to working memory. Prinz’s view, varying a themefrom the work of Stanislas Dehaene, is that this projection to workingmemory is what makes it the case that the content represented comes toconscious awareness. (Prinz, 2005, 2012, Dehaeneet al.,2006).

It should be noted that Prinz’s main philosophical business iswith the explanation ofconsciousness. Objections have beenraised as to whether the process of projection to workingmemory—which Prinz refers to as‘attention’—can adequately account for the variousthings that attention does (Wu, 2014, §6.3.2). If it cannot thenPrinz is willing to allow that this process is not the sole referentof the English word ‘attention’, writing that ‘otherresearchers may choose to define attention differently’, andthat ‘those who disagree with my analysis of attention couldsimply drop the term “attention”’ (Prinz, 2012, p.95).

The central component of the late-selection theory, as it wasoriginally understood, was that the effect of withdrawing attentionfrom a stimulus is to make it the case that that stimulus is processedwithout the subject’s awareness, rather than not being processedat all. This component of the view has, to some extent, beenvindicated. The claim that unattended stimuli are subjected to someprocessing of which the subject lacks awareness, including someprocessing of those stimuli’s semantic properties, is nowuncontroversial. Since we know that the semantic properties ofunattended stimuli can, for example, produce negative priming effects(Tipper and Driver, 1988), we know that unattended stimuli areprocessed in a way that allows at least some of their semanticproperties to be encoded. The semantic properties of unattended itemshave such effects despite the fact that experimental participants aretypically unaware of what those properties are.

The traditional late selection theory is right in taking it thatinattention can lead to properties being encoded without ourawareness, rather than not being encoded at all, but that theory isalso committed to the claim that attention’sonlyeffects are in determining what gets remembered and experienced, sothat the direction of attention has no effects on the initialperceptual processing to which stimuli are subjected. These latterclaims we now know to be false. An important experiment byO’Connoret al. used fMRI to compare neural activity inparticipants who, in various task conditions, were presented with highand low contrast checkerboard patterns in one or other half of theirvisual field (O’Connoret al. 2002). In some conditionsthese participants had to perform a task involving these checkerboardpatterns. In other conditions the patterns were irrelevant to the taskthat the participants were performing (and in a third condition nopattern was presented, but the participants were attending to thescreen in anticipation of a pattern that was about to be presented).The results of these comparisons reveal that even in the first partsof the neural circuitry through which information from the retinapasses, on its way to the visual cortex—even, that is, in theLateral Geniculate Nuclei—there is a difference in the baserateof neural activity, and a difference in the response that stimulielicit, depending on what the participant is attending to. Thesefindings indicate that attention’s effects are not limited tocortical loci that are upstream from a late process of attentionalselection. They therefore refute any version of the late-selectiontheory according to which the selectivity of attention is entirely a‘late process’, occurring only after initial perceptualencoding is complete.

The findings of O’Connoret al. create fewer problemsfor some recent theories in which elements of the late selection vieware retained. Nilli Lavie and her collaborators have proposed one suchtheory, which attempts to combine some aspects of the late selectiontheory with some aspects of its early selectionist rival. According toLavie’s ‘load theory’, attentiondoescorrespond to a capacity bottleneck—much as Broadbentthought—but the differing demands of the task that is at handlead to differences as to where that bottleneck restricts theprocessing of a stimulus: in conditions where the processing demandsof perception are high the available resources will soon be exhausted,and the bottleneck will operate at an early stage, with the resultthat unattended stimuli will be processed rather little; in conditionswhere the processing load of perception is lower the bottleneck willoperate at a later stage, with the result that unattended stimuli willbe processed rather more (Lavie & Tsal, 1994, Lavieetal. 2004). This load theory predicts that peripheral stimuli willelicit less neural activation, and will be less distracting, when thesubject’s task is a perceptually demanding one. Thesepredictions have been borne out by behavioural and neurologicalobservations (Lavie, 2005). The theory’s theoreticalapparatus has also provided a useful framework for the philosophicaltreatment of attention’s relationship to consciousness (Hine,2010). Many psychologists nonetheless continue to be wary ofLavie’s rehabilitation of elements from the Broadbentianframework.

Other theories have been proposed that also retain the Broadbentianidea that attentional selectivity is the result of capacitylimitations, while retreating further than Lavie from the picture ofattention that Broadbent introduced. These theories reject the termsof the debate between early and late selectionists because they rejectthe idea that the capacity limitations responsible for attention areclustered into a single bottleneck. In some cases this is because theselectivity of attention is taken to be the result ofmultiple bottlenecks in processing capacity (see, e.g.,Johnston and McCann, 2006). In other cases it is because thesetheorists see capacity limitations as occurring throughout theprocessing stream, and not as clustered into bottlenecks at all (seeDriver, 2001, for a suggestion along these lines, and Allport, Antonis& Reynolds, 1972, for an earlier indication of it).

2.1.3 Other Capacity-Limitation Theories

The early and late selection theories dominated discussions ofattention in the decades following Broadbent’s seminal work, butby the beginning of the nineteen nineties it had become clear that thedebate between advocates of the early selection theory and advocatesof the late selection theory had become fruitless. Those debates weretherefore thought to have been predicated on some sort of mistakenassumption. Several different diagnoses have been proposed as to whatthat mistaken assumption might have been. Little consensus has beenreached as to which of these diagnoses is correct, with the resultthat some theorists—such as those discussed at the end of thepreceding section—retain ideas from the early and late selectiontheories, while others regard this as a wrong-headedly retrogradestep.

One diagnosis is that the early/late debate was fruitless because theterms ‘early’ and ‘late’ are themselvesproblematic. If perceptual processing occurs in a parallel processingarchitecture without any prevailing direction of information flow thenthere can be no sense in labeling one part of that architecture asearlier or later than any other. If the attentional bottleneck islocated in a system that has such an architecture then it may be thisthat explains why there was no satisfactory answer to the question ofwhether attentional selection is early or late. It seems to have beenwith this thought in mind that some writers have suggested that thefailure of the debate between early and late selection theories wasowing to the fact that that debate requires us to make an assumptionabout thelinearity of the processing stream in whichselection occurs (see, e.g., Prinz and Hommel, 2002, 3). This is athought that needs to be treated with care.

The claim that it was a problematic assumption about linearity thatled the early/late selection debate into fruitlessness received itsmost influential treatment in an important paper by Alan Allport(Allport, 1992). Allport identifies several problematic assumptionsthat the early/late selection debate requires. His characterization ofwhat he takes to be the problematic assumption about linearity is asthe claim that:

[T]he processing of nonsemantic attributes (i.e. the processing ofattributes other than symbolic or categorical identity) occurs earlierin a logical/causal sequence of operations than does any semantic orcategorical processing. (1992, 187)

Despite Allport’s qualms, this assumption about linearity doesnot seem, on the face of it, to be a problematic one. There is nothingto be objected to in the claim that the situations in which weencounter a written word and come to be in a position to know whatthat word means are typically situations in which our sensorytransducers respond firstly to simple nonsemantic properties of theword. In order for creatures like us to detect the semantic propertiesof written words, itis necessary for our informationprocessing systems to first encode some information about the simplespatial properties of the lines on the page. This information doesthen get passed on to subsequent processing stages in which morecomplex properties, concerned with semantics and stimulus identity,get processed. If this sort of linearity is what Allport was takingissue with then it seems he must have been mistaken, since there isnothing problematic about the idea that there is this much linearityin the processing to which stimuli are subjected.

Nor is there anything unscientific about that idea. It continues to beentirely normal for neuroscientists to refer to the processing thattakes place in occipital brain areas as ‘early’ and theprocessing in frontal areas as ‘late’. Such thinking canbe seen in a much-cited review of neuroimaging work on attention, inwhich Sabine Kastner and Leslie Ungerleider speak of:

… an increase in the complexity of processing as activityproceeds anteriorly through the ventral stream into the temporal lobe.Whereas posterior regions in cortex are preferentially activatedduring the processing of object attributes, such as colors orscrambled objects and faces, more anterior regions are activatedselectively during the processing of intact objects and faces. (2000,319)

The orthodox view, expressed here by Kastner and Ungerleider, issubject to differing interpretations. Those who believe thatperception and cognition are best thought of as arising from ahierarchical Bayesian process might reject the idea that informationprogresses through the nervous system in a bottom-up fashion, with thedetection of simple properties happening at an early stage, and thedetection of more complex properties happening at a later one. Currentadvocates of such hierarchical Bayesian theories place great emphasison the idea that the prior hypotheses required by a Bayesian inferencecan be generated in a top-down fashion, and can then be tested againstincoming signals which contain information only about the ways inwhich the predictions generated by those hypotheses are in error(Hohwy, 2013). Such theories break from the tradition of thinkingabout the information flow in the brain as being largely one-way, butthey retain the idea that information is organized into a structurewith earlier and later stages, with these stages now being understoodas corresponding to the more or less abstract layers in anhierarchically organized Bayesian inference. They therefore retain theidea that there are earlier and later stages in the processing of anygiven stimulus, while rejecting the idea that there is one predominantdirection of information flow in the brain. Since this much linearityremains in our current thinking about the architecture of perceptualprocessing, we cannot coherently blame an assumption about this muchlinearity for the troubles that led to the fruitlessness of the debatebetween early and late selectionists.

That is not to say that the early/late selection debate was entirelyfree of problematic assumptions relating to linearity—only thatpsychology has not yet settled upon a satisfactory account of the wayin which assumptions about linearity led the early/late debate intotrouble.

A reason why assumptions about linearity may have been problematic isthat when, following Broadbent, we think about hierarchical perceptualprocessingwhile bearing in mind the communicationsengineer’s concerns about capacity limitations, it thenbecomes natural to make some additional assumptions about the way inwhich this hierarchically organized architecture supportspersonal-level cognition. The early/late debate’s problems aremore plausibly blamed on these additional assumptions, rather than onany assumptions about linear or hierarchical organizationperse. Given that some physical properties of a thing must first berepresented in order for a person to become aware of thatthing’s semantic properties, it is natural for thecommunications engineer to suppose that no further representation ofthese physical properties needs to be generated in order for thatperson to also be aware of those properties, so that a person who isexperiencing the semantic properties of a stimulus must have beenthrough a process that already gives them an experience of thatstimulus’s simple spatial properties. This additionalsupposition would be a mistake, since the brain represents thephysical properties of stimuli in multiple, parallel, somewhatoverlapping systems, only some of which put the subject in a positionto think about the properties that they represent. In order to get toa representation of the meaning of the word on a page, thesubject’s brain must represent that word’s physicalproperties, but it turns out that the brain’s representation ofthese physical properties need not put this perceiver in a position toform thoughts about them. Their access to these properties mightrequire that the properties be represented all over again, in someparallel system. From the point of view introduced by Broadbent– that of a communications engineer who is concerned with themanagement of limited capacity channels – this seems strangelyprofligate. At least some of the problems with the early/late debatecan be attributed to this: not an assumption about linearityperse, but an assumption about the linearity of the processes thatsupport personal level thinking.

Once the problematic assumption about linearity has been made precise,however, we see that it cannot be satisfactory to credit the entirecollapse of the early/late debate to this assumption. The falsity ofthe assumption about the linearity of the processes supportingpersonal-level awareness does not undermine the very idea that theearly/late debate is a meaningful one. The problems that it createsare largely methodological. The falsity of that assumption means thatone cannot make an inference from a lack of personal-level awarenessof some content to the absence of representations encoding thatcontent. It also means that Broadbent was wrong to suppose that thepsychological effects of unattended stimuli can only depend on thoseproperties of which the inattentive perceiver can be aware. But theseare methodological problems. They do not, by themselves, imply thatthe debate between the early selection theory and the late selectiontheory must have been misconceived.

The situation that we find ourselves in is, then, a somewhat unhappyone. Everybody agrees that there was something misconceived about thedebate between the two theories of attention that dominated thedecades following Broadbent’s reintroduction of attention to thepsychological agenda. The ongoing influence of Broadbent’sselection theory, and of the early/late debate, has often been noted,and sometimes lamented (Driver, 2001, 56). But nobody is clear aboutwhether the elements of those theories that are retained in currenttheorizing are problematic ones.

2.2 Feature Integration Theory

In the early nineteen eighties, Anne Treisman and her collaboratorsidentified the existence of ‘the binding problem’, anddescribed a process that could solve that problem. Treisman proposedthat attention be identified with this process. This proposal is knownas the Feature Integration Theory of attention. It has been hugelyinfluential, not only as a theory of attention, but also as theframework that introduced and regimented research into theindependently interesting question of the binding problem (for more onwhich, see‘The Unity of Consciousness’ esp.§2.2).

Treisman describes the way in which the binding problem arises likethis:

Sensory information arrives in parallel as a variety of heterogeneoushints, (shapes, colors, motions, smells and sounds) encoded in partlymodular systems. Typically many objects are present at once. Theresult is an urgent case of what has been labelled the bindingproblem. We must collect the hints, bind them into the right spatialand temporal bundles, and then interpret them to specify their realworld origins. (2003, 97)

We can illustrate this problem with an example. Suppose we have asubject who is presented, at one time, with a red tomato and a greenapple. This visual input is, Treisman says, initially broken up forspecialized distributed processing—so that, for example, onepart of the brain is responsible for detecting the shapes of things, adifferent part is responsible for detecting their colours. Theshape-detecting centres represent the fact that a tomato-shaped thingis present, and they represent the fact that an apple-shaped thing ispresent. The colour-detecting centres represent the fact that a redthing is present, and the fact that a green thing is present. But thesubject, if he is a normal human, knows more than is implied by thesefour facts: He knows that the red thing is the tomato-shaped thing andthe green thing the apple-shaped thing. To know this he must have away of ‘binding’ the representation of red in the colourcentre with the representation of the tomato shape in the shapecentre. The binding problem is the problem of knowing how to puttogether the properties that have been detected in separatespecialized detection centres.

Treisman’s proposed solution exploits the fact thatspatial representations are ubiquitous, and the idea thatthere is only one thing to be seen in any one place at any one time.If the centre for detecting colours detects redat place oneand greenat place two, and if the centre for detecting shapedetects a tomato shapeat place one and an apple shapeatplace two, then, given the principle that there is a maximum ofone visible object per place per time, the binding problem can besolved. Treisman therefore proposes that we achieve a correctly boundrepresentation by moving a variously sized ‘window’ fromone location in the perceptual scene to another. This window blocksout the information from all but a single location, and all thefeatures found at that location can then be ‘bound’ asbeing features of the same object. The area covered by the windowwithin which features are bound is taken to correspond to the regionto which attention is being paid.

There is more than one way to understand the explanatory import ofTreisman’s claim that the window of attention corresponds to thewindow within which features are bound. Treisman’s early workpresents that claim as an attempt to identify the processes ofattention (by telling us that they are the processes of featureintegration). In her later work the explanation being offered is nolonger simply one in which it is attention that occupies the role ofexplanandum and binding processes that occupy the role of explanans.Her later claim is that solving the binding problem is one role forthe kind of selectivity that attention enables.

There is some work in which the Feature Integration Theory has beenpressed into the service of more ambitious explanatory goals. Thattheory plays an important role in John Campbell’s 2002 attempt,inReference and Consciousness, to use attention to explainhow the reference of demonstrative expressions gets fixed by theirproducers, and understood by their consumers (see section3.2). Treisman herself suggests, albeit tentatively, that descendants ofthe Feature Integration Theory may provide part of the explanation for“the bound, unitary, interpreted, personal view of the world ofsubjective experience” (Treisman, 2003, 111). She goes on tosuggest, again tentatively, that the sort of explanation that such atheory provides “should give us all the information there isabout the conditions that create consciousness” (opcit).

Opposed to those who think that a theory of feature binding will be alarge component in our theory of attention, of the unity ofconsciousness, or of anything else, are a number of philosophers (anda smaller number of psychologists) who deny that feature bindingcreates a problem that needs any serious cognitive apparatus for itssolution. Such claims have been made for a variety of reasons. Theyare generally made as part of large-scale revisionary proposals forthe conceptual framework of cognitive neuroscience. KevinO’Regan and Alva Noë’s rejection of the bindingproblem ‘as, in essence, a pseudo-problem’ (O’Reganand Noë, 2001, 967) comes as part of their general attack on theidea that perception requires the representation of the thingperceived. Vincent Di Lollo has suggested that the assumptions aboutneural coding that generate the binding problem have been superseded,with the result that the binding problem is an ill-defined one (DiLollo, 2012). And M.R. Bennett and P.M.S. Hacker, in their book-lengthcritique of the philosophical foundations of neuroscience, claim thatthe notions of representation and information that enjoy currency inneuroscience are subject to various confusions, and that theseconfusions lead to it being ‘widespread’ forneuroscientists to make “confused statements of the so-calledbinding problem” (Bennett and Hacker, 2003, 14). These debatesabout the status of the binding problem (reviewed by Plate, 2007) turnon foundational issues for the cognitive sciences generally. They haveceased to be specifically concerned with the explanation ofattention.

Even if these philosophical critics of the binding problem are rightto suggest that a perceiver can typically experience severalproperties as belonging to a single object without the need for anyspecial binding process to integrate the representations of thoseproperties, it may nonetheless be true that, in some particular cases,attention does play a role in determining the way in which differentstreams of sensory information come to be combined. Even in thesecircumscribed cases, the question of how this binding-like role forattention should be characterized may raise its own philosophicaldifficulties. Several psychologists studying the integration ofinformation from across different sensory modalities have foundthemselves running into such difficulties, claiming that the role ofattention in integrated multisensory perception is‘curious’, and ‘a paradox’, especially incases that involve the perception of speech (Tiippana, Andersen andSams, 2004; Macalusoet al., 2016). Philosophers who haveinterrogated the assumptions leading to the idea there is a generalbinding problem have not yet extended their critique to these morespecific cases. A preliminary philosophical examination suggests thatthese may be cases in which the appearance of paradox derives fromcertain questionable assumptions about the predominantly bottom-upnature of perceptual processing, or from assumptions of a moremetaphysical sort, concerning the localizable way in whichattention’s causal influence is exerted (Mole, 2020).

2.3 Coherence Theories

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

In two papers from 1987, authored individually but published in thesame volume, Odmar Neumann and Alan Allport developed a similar idea.Whereas Neisser emphasized the constraints that are imposed oncognition by the need to manage a single body, Neumann and Allportboth emphasized the constraints that are placed on cognition by theneed to maintain a coherent course of goal-directed action. Theydescribe their position as a ‘selection-for-action’theory.

If we think of ‘action’ as here referring to bodilybehaviour then the selection-for-action theory is very similar toNeisser’s view. But Neumann and Allport’s point retainsits force if we extend the notion of action to include deliberatemental activities, such as puzzle-solving, for which no bodilylimitations are in play. There is here an “analogy betweenpractical and theoretical and activity”, which was noted in an1891 paper by G. F. Stout:

Thinking is action directed towards intellectual ends. Intellectualends are attained by an appropriate combination of movements ofattention just as practical ends are attained by an appropriatecombination of movements of the body. If, therefore, we desire toexplain the process of Thinking, we must clearly determine the natureof active Attention. (Stout, 1891, p. 23)

As Stout and the later generations of action-oriented theoristsindicate, the need to select among several possible sources ofinformation, and to select among several possible things that might bedone with the information that has then been selected, is acharacteristic of almost all deliberately executed thoughts andactions, whether those actions are bodily or intellectual. Thisubiquitous need for selectivity has been emphasized in a series ofworks by Wayne Wu, where it is referred to as the “many manyproblem”(Wu, 2011a, 2014, 2019).

In Wu’s handling of it, the idea that Neumann and Allportemphasized becomes part of a larger attempt to understand theessential connections between attention and agency (Wu, 2011b). ForWu, attention’s role in action is more fundamental than its rolein perception. Stout is not the only precedent for this idea. The sameconnection was noted by William James when he claimed that“Volition is nothing but attention”, (see Section1.5, above). As with these earlier authors, Wu’s point is not justthat, by treating attention as a purely perceptual phenomenon, weignore many of its other instances. Instead Wu wants to suggest thatany division we might attempt to draw between perceptual attention andthe attentional selectivity required by agency would be an artificialone. Even the involuntary capture of attention by perceptually salientstimuli should, Wu thinks, be understood as involving a kind ofreadiness to act on the things to which we involuntarily attend(op cit, §3). Wu’s selection-for-action theory ofattention is therefore intended as a step towards a unification of ourphilosophical account of ourselves as agents and our philosophicalaccount of ourselves as perceivers.

According to selection-for-action type views, the function ofattention is not the management of capacity limitations. It is,instead, the management of capacityexcess. It is because wecan process multiple stimuli that we can be distracted by them, andbecause we can be distracted by them, not because we cannot processthem, that we need mechanisms of attention to provide selectivity andfocus. Attention, on this view, serves to lend coherence to, and toprevent interference between, the activity of several components in asystem that has the capacity to handle far more stimuli than thosepertaining to the subject’s current task. Such a view contrastssharply with Broadbent’s conception of attentional selectivityas capacity-bottleneck management.

2.4 General-Purpose Prioritization

In the tradition perpetuated by Wu, the selectivity of attention isunderstood as providing a solution to one particular problem, createdby the fact that there are multiple courses of action that might betaken at any time, with the taking of any one requiring the others tobe suppressed. The solving of this particular problem is not the onlycognitive need that could be served by an operation of selectivity,even in a mind without bottlenecks of processing capacity. Theselection-for-action theory is therefore not the only alternative toBroadbent’s bottleneck theory. Other functions for attentionalselectivity might also be proposed. Alternatively—rather thanelecting any one of these functions of cognitive selectivity as beingthe function that is essentially served by attention—we mightinstead characterize attention as a quite general process ofselectivity, recruitable on any of the various occasions when onething needs to prioritized over another, whether this prioritizationis required by the presence of a processing bottleneck, required inorder for a coherent action-plan to be executed, or required for somequite different reason. The work of Sebastian Watzl develops the ideathat attention might be such a non-specific process of prioritization(Watzl, 2017).

In Watzl’s treatment of it, this idea places particular emphasison the fact that, just as a binary ‘is greater than’relation can introduce a partial ordering on a set, so a number ofthese binary prioritizations can be considered in sum, as introducinga prioritization structure on the several items that togetherconstitute one’s mental life. For Watzl, attention is theprocess by which one’s life comes to have such a structure.

Watzl also claims that any mind which lacked such a structure wouldtherefore be lacking a particular perspective on the world, and sowould not be the mind of a creature with the subjective point of viewthat is characteristic of conscious experiences. From this he derivesthe claim that every conscious creature is attentive. Carolyn Jenningshas suggested that certain kinds of highly engaged expert performancemay be a counterexample to this (Jennings, 2015).

2.5 Precision Optimization Theories and Prediction Error Coding

The idea that there might be reasons for attentional selection thathave nothing to do with processing bottlenecks has also been a themein the work of psychologists hoping to understand perception as aprocess of Bayesian inference (Fristonet al. 2006,Summerfield & Egner, 2013), and in the work of those philosopherswho have been influenced by them (Hohwy, 2013; Clark, 2013, 2017).

In what has come to be the most philosophically developed version ofthis Bayesian approach to the mind (Hohwy, 2013, Clark, 2013),cognition as a whole is understood to be a process of Bayesianupdating, in which a hierarchically-organized series of hypotheses isconstantly being tested, with each hypothesis being updated in thelight of evidence coming from the level below. Advocates of thistheory attempt to find room within this hierarchical framework for allaspects of cognition, including perception, thought, and action. Acentral claim of their theory is that the information that gets passedup through this hierarchy is encoded in the form of signalsrepresenting theerrors in the predictions that have beenmade by hypotheses at the hierarchy’s next level up, with thecontent of one’s experience at any time being given by whicheverhypothesis makes the least erroneous predictions. (Different versionsof the theory use different techniques to calculate the relative sizeof these prediction errors.) Given their commitment toprediction-error coding, a central claim of these theories is that therole of our sensory encounter with the world is to provide informationabout the way in which our prior hypotheses get things wrong: insteadof providing us with the information that it has started to rain, oursenses provide only the information that it is more rainy than we hadexpected.

Advocates of this theory claim that it “allows us to seeattention in a new light and to provide alternative conceptualizationsof its functional role in our overall mental economy” (Hohwy,2014, p. 191). According to these ‘alternativeconceptions’, attention adjusts the weighting of incomingprediction error signals, in accordance with their expectedprecision (Hohwy, 2012). ‘Precision’ is to beunderstood here in the sense that contrasts precision with accuracy.‘Accuracy’, in the intended sense, is a measure of thedifference between the value indicated by a signal and the actualvalue, whereas ‘precision’ is a measure of the randomfluctuation in that signal, even when the actual input is heldconstant. A miscalibrated instrument might, in this sense, be highlyprecise, without being especially accurate.

Various empirical results make it plausible that the brain takesaccount of expected precisions when it is processing perceptualsignals. In the ventriloquist illusion, for example, it is plausiblethat expectations of precision have a role to play: It is becausevision is expected to give a more precise indication of location thanaudition that sounds are heard to come from the location where theirsource is apparently seen. Other considerations make it equallyplausible that attention plays a role in accommodating the variationsin these expected precisions, as we move from one context to another.If we expect that the signal from vision is likely to be a noisyone—perhaps because a thick fog has started todescend—then we may place more weight than usual on theinformation that is present in the signal coming from audition. Itseems likely that there is a role for attention in bringing about thischange of weighting. It is more controversial to claim, as theadvocates of this theory do, that “attention is nothing butprecision optimization in hierarchical inference.” (Hohwy, 1014,p.244, citing Feldman & Friston, 2010). Ransomet al.have suggested that, by taking attentionalways to beprecision optimization, this theory struggles to account for certainforms of voluntary attention (Ransomet al. 2017). Clark hassuggested that this challenge can be met if the sources of voluntaryattention are identified with beliefs, rather than desires (Clark,2017).

2.6 Competition Theories and Cognitive Unison

Like the precision-optimization theories that have been advocated byHohwy and Clark, from within the framework of the prediction-errorcoding theory, the Coherence theories advocated by Neisser, Neumann,Allport, and Wu have also suggested functions for attention other thanthe management of limitations in processing capacity. Despite theavailability of these non-Broadbentian conceptions ofattention’s function, the Broadbentian idea thatattention’s selectivity serves to manage limitations inprocessing capacity continues to be regarded by many psychologists asincontrovertible. The claim that “Because the visual system doesnot have the capacity to process all inputs simultaneously, there mustexist attentional processes that help the visual system select someinputs” continues to be treated as a platitude of the sort thatcan be used as an uncontroversial opening sentence when introducingone’s research. (The example just given comes from the beginningof Vecera (2000), but many more examples of the same claim can easilybe found.)

For those who reject this platitude, and think that thefunction of attention is something other than the managementof limitations in processing capacity, it is natural to think that themechanisms of attentional selection may be something otherthan capacity bottlenecks.

The clearest non-bottleneck mechanisms for achieving selectivity arecompetitions. Since well-organized competitions can alwaysselect one winner, however good and however numerous the competitors,the selectivity of a competitive mechanism need not have anything todo with bottlenecks, or with any other limitations of processingcapacity.

Competition-based mechanisms for achieving selectivity come in atleast two varieties: In a simplerace mechanism each of thecompetitors independently completes a process that is comparable,along some dimension of variation, with the processes that arecompleted by each of the other competitors. The competitor thatachieves the highest value on the relevant dimension of variation isselected as the winner. In astruggle the competitors do notjust get on with their own processing in the hope that they will do itbetter than each of the other competitors. Instead the activesuppression of other competitors is a part of the process that eachcompetitor carries out. Simple race models of attention have beenproposed (Shibuya and Bundesen, 1988, Bundesen, 1987), but our bestcurrent theories supplement the simple race mechanism with somecomponents of mutual struggle, or with additional processes oftop-down control (see, for example, Bundesen and Habekost, 2008).

One suggestion for a supplemented-competition mechanism forattentional selectivity is the biased-competition model, elaborated inseveral works by Robert Desimone, John Duncan and John Reynolds. Thebiased-competition model accounts for various attention-involvingeffects, at the personal and at the sub-personal level, as beingeffects that arise from numerous struggles between the differentstimuli that fall within the variously sized receptive fields ofneurons throughout the perceptual processing hierarchy. It ishypothesized that each one of these struggles is biased, although notsettled outright, by a top-down attention-specific signal (Desimoneand Duncan, 1995, Reynolds and Desimone, 2001).

We have said that competitions are selective in ways that do notinvolve limitations in capacity, and that competition-based theoriesof attention’s underlying mechanisms are therefore naturalaccompaniments to selection-for-action type views of attention’sfunction (Section2.3), and perhaps to other views that involve a break from the Broadbentianview according to which attention’s function is the managementof capacity limitations. Competition views of attention’smechanisms do not, however, require us to take a non-Broadbentian viewof attention’s function. Although the biased competition viewsits naturally with a non-Broadbentian view of that function, Reynoldsand Desimone continue to introduce the biased competition theory as anattempt to understand attention in recognizably Broadbentian terms,writing that:

The visual system is limited in its capacity to process information.However, it is equipped to overcome this constraint because it candirect this limited capacity channel to locations or objects ofinterest. (2001, 233)

Some advocates of the biased competition view emphasize the particularimportance of the top-down biasing signals that the theory postulates(e.g., Beck and Kastner, 2009, p. 1156), taking thesource ofthese signals to be the true locus of attentional selection. Otherssuggest that the biased competition theory is better understood as atheory that refuses to identify any such locus, and that it shouldinstead be read (as suggested in Duncan’s original presentationof the theory, (Duncan 1996)) as attributing the selectivity ofattention to the totality of an integrated competition, involvingprocesses of various sorts at various levels, any part of which canbias any other (Mole, 2011, §6.7, 2015).

When it is understood in this second way the biased-competition theoryaccords with the proposal that attention should be taken to have ametaphysical status analogous to that of unison in an orchestra.According to this view it is always a mistake to identify any oneprocess as the attention process (or any set of processes as theattention processes); attention requires the unified activity ofwhichever processes happen to be relevant to a person’s currenttask, but, since these vary from one task to the next, it does notrequire anyparticular processes to be taking place. Such aview has been developed in work by Christopher Mole, who dubs it the‘Cognitive Unison Theory’. Metaphysically speaking, such atheory can be understood as a revival of John Locke and F.H.Bradley’s view that attention is a mode of thinking (seeSection 1.3 above). Phenomenologically the view has a precedent in Ribot’ssuggestion that attention be identified with ‘monoideism’(Ribot, 1889, p. 10). It also draws on some ideas about the‘polymorphousness’ of attention, which were advocated in a1964 monograph by Alan White, on the basis of considerations drawnfrom the examination of various ‘heed concepts’ in naturallanguage.

Because operating in unison requires an absence of task-irrelevantprocessing, the most straightforward version of the unison theoryentails that full attention is a rare achievement, with most cases ofattentiveness involving what is, strictly speaking, only partial ordivided attention. Mole (like Ribot) accepts this implication. YairLevy has suggested that doing so prevents him from giving an adequateaccount of phenomena such a listening, or observing, which alwaysrequire some attention to be paid, but which can nonetheless be donemore or less attentively (Levy, 2019). Work by Philipp Koralus hassuggested that a more satisfactory treatment of divided attention canbe given if the attentive pursuit of a task is understood to sharecertain formal properties with the answering of a question (Koralus,2014). This characterization of attention as “the means by whichwe answer questions about the environment” has been argued foron phenomenological and epistemological grounds by Naomi Eilan (Eilan,1998). (Eilan credits the thought to Rowland Stout, whose treatment ofit can be found in Chapter 9 §5 of Stout 2006.) Koralus draws onHamblin’s 1958 semantics of questions to provide a formal modelof such questioning (Hamblin, 1958).

There are philosophical issues, independent of the cognitive unisontheory, about the way in which partial or divided attention relates tofull attention, and about whether a distinction should be drawnbetween the attention that is given to things by which we are merelydistracted and the attention that is given to things on which weremain concertedly focused. Aaron Henry considers these questions aspart of a more general enquiry into attention and control, using thenotion of constitutive norms to provide an account in whichdistraction always does involve a certain sort of shortcoming, whilenonetheless qualifying as a case of genuine attention, rather thanmerely being a defective approximation of it (Henry, 2019). ZacharyIrving has suggested that the wandering of a distracted mind presentsphilosophical puzzles of its own, and has worked towards giving anempirically-informed account of mind-wandering that avoids thesepuzzles. His account takes such wandering to be attentive but unguided(Irving, 2016). Theories such as the Cognitive Unison Theory, in whichattention essentially depends on the performance of anunderstanding-guided task, will need to find some alternative accountof the phenomena that Irving identifies.

2.7 Spotlight Theories

Whereasbottleneck metaphors have traditionally guided thetheories that attempt to locate the cognitive resources that operateonly on attended stimuli, it has beenspotlight metaphorsthat have guided the theories that attempt to say which features of astimulus determine whether attention is being paid to that stimulus atany given moment (e.g., Watchel, 1967; Woodman and Luck, 1999; seeFernandez-Duque and Johnson, 2002, for discussion). The idea suggestedby the spotlight metaphor is that a stimulus’slocationultimately determines whether or not that stimulus receives attention:the point here is not to deny that one can pay attention to somethingon account of it being brightly coloured, or on account of it beinginteresting. The point is, instead, that one pays attention tobrightly coloured or interesting things only by directing one’sattention to the location of those things.

One can easily see why the spotlight metaphor has been appealing. Ifwe are presented with an array of differently coloured shapes,appearing and disappearing in various places, then there will be anynumber of attention-demanding tasks that we might perform regardingthat array. Some tasks might require us to attend to whatever is goingon at the top of the screen, others might require us to attend to allthe red shapes, or to all the triangles, or to something else. Some ofthese ways of attending seem to be more basic than others. It seems,for example, that attending to things in the top part of the screenmight be a primitive task, whereas attending to the triangles couldnot be primitive in the same way: we cannotsimply attend tothe triangles. If we want to attend to the triangles, we need first towork outwhere the triangles are. If, on the other hand, wewant to attend to the things in the top part of the screen we do notneed to work out whether they are triangles. It is therefore plausiblethat when we attend to the triangles we do soby attending totheir locations. In this sense attending on the basis of locationseems to be more basic than attending on the basis of shape.

The idea that attending to a location is more basic than attending toa shape might tempt one to think that attending on the basis oflocation is absolutely basic, so that attention is always and onlyallocated on the basis of location. If that were right then a theoryof the spatial allocation of attention—a theory about the movingand focusing of an ‘attentional spotlight’—would bea large and central component in an account of how attention works.This would be good news for those who want to give a single unifiedtheory of attention, and it would be good news for the scientificproject of explaining attention more generally, sinceattention’s spotlight-like behaviours are some of its bestunderstood aspects (see Logan, 1996).

There are reasons to think that location does play a special role inthe allocation of attention, as the spotlight metaphor suggests. Butthe role of location in the allocation of attention is probably not asstraightforward as would be required by the most parsimonious ofspotlight-based theories. Location does have a special role to playhere, but (1) location is not the only property to have such a role,and (2) the role of location is more complicated than a simplespotlight metaphor suggests.

Empirical debates about the direction of the spotlight of attentionhave focussed mostly on the second of these points. An importantsource of data here is case studies contrasting the different patternsof attention failure that are shown by different unilateral neglectpatients. Such studies suggest that various frames of reference areinvolved in the spatial allocation of attention (Behrmann and Tipper,1999). This indicates that there is nosingle map oflocations determining which items get attention: attention issometimes allocated on the basis of location in egocentric space,sometimes on the basis of location in more complex frames of reference(a point that was among those raised by Allport, in his influentialcritique of the Broadbentian debates (see Allport, 1992, p. 197)).

There are also some well-known experimental effects suggesting thatattention is allocated, not on the basis of straightforward spatialcoordinates, but in ways that are constrained by the distribution ofobjects in space. The classic work in this area is JohnDuncan’s demonstration that attention shifts more readilybetween two locations that fall within the bounds of a single objectthan between equidistant locations that are separated by an objectboundary (Duncan, 1984). Equally important here are findings fromexperiments using three-dimensional stimuli, and using virtualthree-dimensional displays. These studies suggest that experimentalparticipants are unable to differentially attend to depths in an emptyspace, but that these participants start to be able to shift theirattention forwards and backward (to a place in front of or behind thepoint that their eyes are fixating) when the relevant locations areones in which there are objects (see Yantis, 1998).

These converging sources of data indicate that the spotlight ofattention is not allocated simply on the basis of coordinates in anysingle spatial frame of reference. That is an important finding forthose attempting to localize mechanisms for the allocation ofattention within the brain (since different brain areas differ intheir mapping of space, and in their representation of spatialinformation about the objects within it). It has been influential inleading psychologists to turn away from simple spotlight metaphors. Itshould be noted, however, that these findings do not threaten the coreof the idea that was suggested by the spotlight metaphor: the factsabout what a person is attending to might still supervene on the factsaboutwhere that person is attending, even if quite numerousand sometimes complex factors are responsible for determining whichlocation that is.

Other effects are somewhat more damaging for a pure spotlight view,although they also stop short of refuting it entirely. Themore-than-merely-spatial complexity of the way in which attention isallocated has been nicely demonstrated in a series of experiments byDwight Kravitz and Marlene Behrmann (Kravitz and Behrmann, 2011). Theparticipants in these experiments have their attention cued by a briefstimulus that is presented at one end of a shape that is shown on acomputer screen. This shape might be a simple rectangle, a rectanglewith bulbous ends, or a more complex ‘H’ or‘h’ shape. It is presented alongside another shape, whichin some cases has the same shape and colour, and in other cases isdifferent. The resulting allocation of attention is then probed bymeasuring the reaction times to stimuli that are presented on and nearthese objects. Kravitz and Behrmann find that all the differentproperties of their stimuliinteract to determine the way inwhich attention is allocated to the screen on which those stimuliappear. Most strikingly of all, they find a difference in theallocation of attention between trials in which the shapes on thescreen are an upper and a lower case ‘H’, and trials inwhich the shapes are an upper case H and number 4, even though thisnumber 4 shape is exactly the same as the lower case h, but presentedupside down. Such findings suggest that attention, even when triggeredby a simple spatial cue, is not allocated merely on the basis oflocation, but also on the basis of shape, colour, and arbitrarylearned meaning.

The discovery that attention can preferentially modulate theprocessing of stimuli on account of their colours, shapes, andmeanings does not prevent us from maintaining that the location of astimulus has a special role to play in the process by which attentionis allocated to it. More than one line of research in psychology hassought to identify some one representation in the brain in which itemsare encoded in a way that determines the extent to which attentionwill be allocated to them. In the longest established of these linesof research—beginning with the work of Koch and Ullman(1985)—this representation has been taken to be amap,in some quite literal sense of ‘map’: the representationis taken to be one in which every location in some region isrepresented, and the representation of these locations is taken to bein some format that immediately encodes the spatial relations betweenthem. Every object that is represented is taken to be represented asbeing at some location, and the properties assigned to these locatedobjects are taken to determine the likelihood that attention will bepaid to the location that the objects occupy. According to the theorythat postulates these ‘salience maps’, location does playa unique role in determining the way in which attention is allocated,despite the fact that other properties also contribute to thatallocation.

In more recent treatments of this idea (Pessoa, 2013) such maps aretaken to include representations, not merely of the objectiveproperties that give an item salience, but also of subjectiveproperties, such as emotional-valence andcurrent-motivational-relevance. The more we think of these maps asbeing augmented with additional, non-spatial information, the lessspotlight-like the allocation of attention represented in them willseem to be, but, provided the representation in question is stillunderstood to be map-like, location can still be understood to have animportant role, and perhaps even a uniquely important one.

Debates about the role of such maps, and about the variety ofsubjective and objective properties that are represented within them,may have some wide-ranging philosophical consequences, concerning morethan just the aptness of the spotlight metaphor. Aaron Henry hassuggested that the viability of some recent philosophical theoriesdepends on the outcome of these debates. Since the recentphilosophical theories of attention have tended to emphasize the roleof agency in attention, they face potential counterexamples frominstances of involuntary attention. Henry suggests that the threat ofsuch counterexamples can be defused if the mechanisms of involuntaryattention capture are understood to involve attention being allocatedon the basis of a map in which the agent’s own priorities foraction are represented (Henry, 2017).

Although the psychological debates about salience maps are ongoing, anargument against pure spotlight views can also be made on moretraditional, phenomenological grounds. A pure spotlight theory,according to which attention is always allocated on the basis oflocation, seems unable to account for the sort of case that Hermannvon Helmholtz and William James were concerned with (see section1.5). There is, as their example suggests, a difference between attendingto the pitch of a note and attending to its timbre, or to itsovertones. This difference in attention does not seem to correspond toany difference in the location attended. Nor does any purelylocation-based theory of attention allocation seem able to account forthe sort attention that one must pay in order to perform a time-basedtask, such as finding out which of a group of shapes appears on screenfor longest. Such temporal aspects of attention have been a relativelylate addition to the psychological research agenda (see the paperscollected in Nobre and Coull, 2010). The research concerning them isbeginning to reveal a diverse range of effects, with a range ofsimilarly diverse neural underpinnings (Nobre and van Ede, 2018). Somephilosophical work has been devoted to the exploration of thesetemporal aspects of attention (see Phillips, 2011), but it is workthat has tended to address questions that further our understanding ofthe experience and perception of time, without attempting tocontribute directly to our philosophical understanding of attentionitself (see the entry ontemporal consciousness).

Since some shifts of attention are not shifts in the locationattended, a theory of the factors that determine which locations asubject is attending to cannot tell us the whole story about theallocation of attention. It might nonetheless be a central componentin a theory of some of attention’s forms (see Wright and Ward,2008).

2.8 Motor Theories

Work in which electrodes are usedin vivo to stimulate areasof the macaque brain known to be associated with eye-movementcoordination has provided strong evidence for the existence of ananatomical overlap between brain areas involved in eye-movementcontrol and those involved in determining which stimuli elicit thestrongest responses in visual cortex. There is also evidence that thisanatomical fact has some functional significance. One suggestivefinding is that the links between frontal eye-movement-control areasand attention-like effects in occipital visual areas are spatiallyspecific: an electrode that is placed so that it elicits an eyemovement to a particular part of the visual field when activated atone level will, if activated at a lower level, elicit changes inneural responsiveness that are exactly similar to the changes that areseen when attention is shifted to that same location (Moore andArmstrong, 2003, Armstrong and Moore, 2007).

These facts have been taken to be suggestive of a ‘motortheory’ of attention, according to which the processesunderpinning attention are, in at least some cases, truncated versionsof the processes underpinning the coordination of movements of sensoryorientation.

The central idea of such a theory is that “the program fororienting attention either overtly or covertly is the same, but in thelatter case the eyes are blocked at a certain peripheral stage”(Rizzolattiet al, 1987, 37). Advocates of motor theories(such as Moore, Armstrong and Fallah, 2003) have characterised theirwork as a revival of the picture that Alexander Bain proposed at theend of the nineteenth century. Bain (as we saw in Section1.5, above) identified attention with truncated versions of themotor-control processes that typically bring about attention’sbehavioural manifestations — processes “stopping short ofthe actual movement performed by the organ” (Bain, 1888,371).

These versions of the motor theory should be distinguished fromtheories that regard attention and motor control as intimately linked,but that place no emphasis on the fact that the motor controlprocesses that have been implicated in attention are processes thatcontrol the movement ofsensory organs. In these theories(which are natural but not obligatory concomitants of the‘selection-for-action’ views discussed insection 2.5) attention stands in an intimate relation to motor control moregenerally. One line of experimental evidence in support of such ageneral connection comes from work by Heiner Deubel and hiscollaborators, in which various changes to the way in which an objectfigures in action are shown to have an attention-indicating influenceon the perceptual discrimination of stimuli that are presented on ornear that object. In one striking example of this, Deubel andSchneider found that the way in which attention is allocated to thespace around a 6.5cm wooden X shape depended on whether the subjectwas reaching with her left hand to grasp the shape by the top-left andbottom right arms, or reaching with her right hand to grasp the shapeby the arms at its top-right and bottom left (Deubel & Schneider,2004). In each case attention was allocated not only to the shape, butto the to-be-gripped parts of it. (For other evidence of interactionsbetween attention and action-targeting, see Tipper, Howard, andHoughton, 1998.)

Motor theories and other action-based theories give a plausibleaccount of some of attention’s instances, but they havelimitations that prevent them from applying with full generality:Since movement of the eyes, or of the limbs, is always movementtoa location motor theories will struggle to account for theallocation of attention on the basis of anything other than location.They therefore face the limitations that we saw when considering purespotlight theories, of being unable to account for shifts in attentionthat do not correspond to differences in the location attended. Nor isit clear how motor theories should be applied to spatial attention inthose sensory modalities where the orientation of the sense organs isless straightforward than it is in the visual case. The motor theorydoes, nonetheless, provide a plausible and well-supported account ofthe location-based variety of visual attention that is displayed intypical attention-lab experiments.

The success of motor theories in accounting for the sorts of attentionthat are found in some typical attention-lab experiments can be giveneither an optimistic or a pessimistic interpretation. The optimisticinterpretation sees the motor theory as providing a successful accountof the processing underpinning some of attention’s simpler andmore central varieties. The pessimistic interpretation sees the motortheory as revealing a problem with our usual experimentalparadigms. The participants in typical laboratory tasks directtheir attention to different parts of their visual field, whilekeeping their eyes fixated on a central spot. The behaviouralsignatures of attention in such tasks are usually reductions inreaction time to the attended stimuli. The neural correlates of thesebehavioural signatures are certain biases as to which stimuli moststrongly drive the neural circuitry that processes them. The centralfinding of the motor-theorists is that these neural and behaviouraleffects can result from attenuated versions of the activityresponsible for directing eye movements. The pessimisticinterpretation of this finding is as revealing that signs that havetraditionally been taken to indicate the direction of attention areactually no more than consequences of the truncated eye-movements thatour experimental paradigms induce, by imposing the restriction thatexperimental participants fixate their gaze on a single location. Ifthat is right then the phenomenon studied in attention labs may not bethe psychologically important one that it has been taken for.

Motor theorists are not the only ones who might be accused ofelevating a theory of some circumscribed subset of attention-relatedphenomena into a spuriously general theory of attention in itsentirety. Henry Taylor has shown that, although the ambition to give ageneral theory of attention is widespread among the philosophers whohave recently written on this subject, it is seldom found in therecent psychological literature, where it has proven fruitful tofollow the influential example of Michael Posner by giving somewhatseparate treatments of attention’s roles in vigilance, inperceptual orientation, and in the focalized deployment of processingresources (Taylor, 2015, 2018; Posner and Boies, 1971). Taylorsuggests that the psychologists’ tolerance for pluralism hereshould be reflected in our philosophical theories.

3. Explanatory Roles for Attention

3.1 Attention and Consciousness

3.1.1 Is Attention Necessary for Consciousness?

The question of whether attention is necessary for consciousness hasbeen answered in various ways. One answer is given by those who thinkthat lots of unattended items appear in consciousness. A differentanswer is given by those who think that only some unattended itemsfigure in consciousness. A third answer is given if we think thatunattended items figure in consciousness only in specialcircumstances. There is some evidence that, independently of anyphilosophical commitments, people differ as to which of these viewsthey find plausible (Schwitzgebel, 2007). There are also some theories(e.g., Watzl, 2017) in which attention is necessary for‘creature consciousness’ in the sense that every consciouscreature must be an attentive one. Such views need not entail thatattention to an object is necessary for the conscious perception ofthat object.

At one extreme end of this spectrum is the view according to whichattention to a thing is strictly necessary for consciousness of it, sothat the things to which we are not paying attention do not figure inour consciousness at all. A number of psychologists endorse this view(e.g., Cohenet al. 2012), as do some philosophers (e.g.,Prinz, 2012, Carruthers, 2015, Montemayor & Haladjian, 2015). Ithas historical precedent in James’s remark, at the beginning ofhis chapter on attention, that “my experience is what I agree toattend to”(James, 1890, ch. 11), and in Kames’ remark that“Attention is requisite even to the simple act of seeing”(Kames, 1769, see Sect1.4, above).

The evidence that is proffered in support of the view that attentionis strictly necessary for consciousness comes from a range ofexperiments showing the surprising extent to which experimentalparticipants are ignorant of the items to which they have paid noattention. In Arien Mack and Irvin Rock’s ‘inattentionalblindness’ paradigm, for example, participants who are given anattention-demanding task pertaining to a stimulus in one part of theirvisual field frequently fail to notice shapes or words that areflashed up elsewhere (Mack & Rock, 1998). In Rensinketal.’s ‘change blindness’ paradigm theparticipants need to see an alternating pair of pictures between tenand twenty times before they can identify a large but narrativelyinconsequential difference between them (Rensinket al.,1997, Rensink, 2002). In the most memorable of these experiments alarge number of participants fail to notice the central appearance ofa man in a gorilla suit when their attention is taken up with thebusiness of counting the number of passes made by one of two teams ina concurrent basketball-type game (Simons & Chabdris, 1999).

No single one of these experiments can establish the claim thatattention is always necessary for consciousness. That claim is auniversally quantified one, and is not entailed by any one of itsinstances. Nor is it clear that what we see in these experimentsreally are instances in which unattended objects drop out ofconsciousness altogether. The participants’ ignorance of thegorilla’s appearance, for example, is compatible with it beingthe case that the presence of the gorilladoes make aphenomenal difference to their inattentive experience. To explainthose participants’ ignorance we need only say that anyphenomenal difference that the unattended gorilla makes is adifference that the participants are unable to use in answering theexperimenter’s question about whether anything strange happenedin the scene. It may be a phenomenal difference that is epistemicallyunusable because it is immediately forgotten (see Wolfe, 1998) or itmay, alternatively, be a difference that is unusable because it is toounstructured and inchoate to be epistemically mobilizable. In thatcase the effect of inattention would be inattentionalagnosia, rather than inattentionalblindness (seeSimons, 2000).

Absolute amnesia for unattended items, or thoroughgoing agnosia forthem, may be indistinguishable from inattentional blindness, bothbehaviourally and from the point of view of retrospectiveintrospection. For that reason it is not a straightforward matter forthe advocates of any of these interpretations of the inattentionalblindness and change blindness effects to rule out the alternativeinterpretations. Subpersonal sources of data (such as experimentsusing neuroimaging) may be the only sources of data that we have to goon. (See Rees,et al. 1999, for an example in which fMRI datais used to argue against the amnesia interpretation of inattentionalblindness effects involving written words).

It is only narratively insignificant differences that go unnoticed inthe change-blindness paradigm. Change blindness effects mighttherefore be taken as showing, not that there is no consciousness inthe absence of attention, but that thereis consciousness inthe absence of attention, the contents of which are restricted to thescene’s overall gist. There are difficulties in adjudicatingbetween these two interpretations experimentally. When features ofgist do seem to be perceived, in the apparent absence of attention,the defender of the claim that attention is necessary forconsciousness may reply by claiming that attention has been paid tothese items, either in a dispersed, non-focal way (Prettyman, 2013),or because these features are briefly and involuntarilyattention-catching (Prinz, 2012, p. 119). Without an experimentaloperationalization of complete inattention, these rivalinterpretations cannot be ruled out, with the result that empiricaldebates about the extent of consciousness beyond attention arecurrently in something of deadlock, with experimenters being able toclaim only to have demonstrated perception in the ‘nearabsence’ of attention (Liet al., 2002, Reddyetal., 2004, Reddyet al., 2006), and so providing onlyinconclusive support to the hypothesis that attention andconsciousness are dissociable (Koch & Tsuchiya, 2007).

The methodological puzzle that we face when trying to settle thedispute between different interpretations of the inattentional andchange blindness effects raises the question of whether ourcommonsense beliefs about the conscious status of unattended items arewell founded. Such beliefs seem to vary from person to person(Schwitzgebel, 2007), and to vary with certain features of the contextin which they are probed (De Brigard, 2010). To the extent that wefind it natural to suppose that unattended items do figure inconsciousness, this may simply be owing to a version of the‘refrigerator-light illusion’: If our reason for believingthat we are conscious of the things to which we pay no attention is areason that depends on our finding that we are conscious of thosethings whenever we check on them then that belief is on shaky ground.A checking procedure cannot provide us with good evidence about thestatus of unattended items since the act of checking is itself an actthat involves a shift in attention to the things checked(O’Regan & Noë, 2001).

Since a direct checking procedure is ruled out we need a moretheory-driven way of assessing the dispute between those who claimthat the consequence of not attending to an item is that the itemdrops out of conscious experience and those who claim that inattentionsimply puts the subject in a poor epistemic position vis-à-visthese unattended items. The current state of our theories is such thatit would be premature to try to settle this dispute by an inference tothe best explanation, since neither side of the dispute has a theoryof the attention/consciousness relation that has been worked out to adegree that would allow the different explanations to be compared. Wecan, however, see some of the considerations that the two sides inthis debate might invoke. Those who endorse the idea that attention isnecessary for consciousness can point to the fact that this viewaccords well with theories in which attention features prominently inthe explanation of consciousness (e.g., Prinz, 2005, 2012). They mayalso be able to develop arguments based on theories of the way inwhich consciousness and attention evolved (Montemayor & Haladjian,2015). Those who prefer the epistemic-deficit interpretation of theinattentional blindness effects (Mole, 2011, §7.3.7) can point tothe fact that that interpretation flows naturally from the viewaccording to which attention to an item provides the sort ofacquaintance that is needed for the use of a demonstrative conceptthat refers to that item (a view advocated by Campbell, 2002, anddiscussed in section3.2 below): If attention to the gorilla is necessary for the forming of ademonstrative-involving thought (such as ‘That’s agorilla’) then there is an immediate explanation, consistentwith the idea that unattended items nonetheless feature inconsciousness, for the fact that inattentive people are unable toanswer questions such as ‘Was there a gorilla?’.

The difficulty in the case of the unnoticed gorilla is to discernwhether unattended items are present to consciousness but present onlyas unindividuated items to which no demonstrative reference has yetbeen directed, or whether those unattended items are instead absentfrom consciousness altogether. Part of this difficulty originates inthe fact that, although most people give no attention to the gorilla,theycould attend to him, and would have done so if anythinghad prompted them to do so. More data may be available, both tointrospection and to laboratory measurement, in cases where ourfailure to attend has some more systemic explanation. Ned Block hassuggested that one such case is found in our perception of peripheralstimuli, when these are subject to the phenomenon of ‘identitycrowding’ (Block, 2013a). An individual ‘T’ or‘F’ can be seen reasonably clearly, even when presented ina peripheral part of the visual field. But if additional charactersare presented alongside this individual character, then the propertiesof those characters become prone to perceptual confusion. Attentionseems to bind together properties from all of the characters in thevicinity of the one individual that we are trying to pick out. Ittherefore seems that, in the perceptual periphery, attention cannot bedirected onto a region that fits an individual character tightly. Dueto this ‘crowding’ effect, individual letters or shapesbecome impossible to individuate from the others with which they areclustered, when they fall into parts of the visual field that areoutside of the high-definition centre. The properties of objects thatare crowded in this way can nonetheless be seen, and the fact thatseveral items are present can be reliably reported. On the basis ofempirical and introspective considerations, Block claims that, even incases where the crowded characters share all of their features withthe others by which they are crowded, these crowded characters areconsciously discriminated from their surroundings. He claims thatthese characters figure as objects in consciousness. Since attentioncannot be allocated to anything more fine-grained than the crowd ofwhich these characters are a part, the characters are not themselvesobjects to which attention is paid. Block therefore takes‘identity crowding’ to give counterexamples to the claimthat we are conscious of objects only when paying attention tothem.

Block’s claim that the crowded characters figure inconsciousness as individuated objects, rather than as parts of somefeature-rich texture, has been contested (Taylor, 2013, Richards,2013). In response, Block has suggested that an inference the bestexplanation of several related phenomena favours his interpretation ofthe effect (Block, 2013b).

Inference to the best explanation is always a hazardous business,especially in the vicinity of an explanatory gap. In theinterpretation of identity crowding, as in the interpretation ofinattentional blindness, the inescapability of abductiveconsiderations suggests that our answer to the question of whetherattention is necessary for consciousness may have to wait until wehave a better understanding of the relation of attention todemonstrative reference (of the sort that is involved in thinking‘That’s a gorilla’), and perhaps until we have abetter understanding of attention’s role in epistemology moregenerally. (Seesections 3.3 & 3.4, below.)

3.1.2 Is Attention Sufficient for Consciousness?

In addition to disputes about whether we are conscious ofonly those things to which we attend, there are also disputesabout whether we are conscious ofeverything to which weattend. If we were then a complete theory of attention might be givenby giving an account of the way in which attention modulatesconsciousness.

Declan Smithies has argued in favour of a position according to whicheverything that is attended to is consciously attended to. He claimsthat all instances of attention must be consciousness-involving, onthe grounds that (1) all such instances must have a connection withtheir subject’s ‘rational-access’ to the contents ofher experience, and (2) there is no connection to rationality in thecase of processing that is wholly unconscious. Smithies’ viewis, therefore, that attention is essentially involved in the‘rational-access’ of consciously experienced contents(Smithies, 2011). The nature of any such connection between attentionto an experience and the justificatory force of that experience isitself a source of ongoing controversy: Johannes Roesller has arguedthat John McDowell’s theory of perceptual experience’sreason-giving force cannot account for the role played by attention inexperience (Roessler, 2011); Susanna Siegel and Nicholas Silins haveclaimed that the doxastic influence of an experience can be aninstance of rational access even when that experience receives noattention (Siegel & Silins, 2014); Terry Horgan and MatjažPotrč have argued that the justification of beliefs by experiencemust outrun both the contents of attention and the contents ofconsciousness (Horgan and Potrč 2011). Here, as above,one’s understanding of attention and one’s understandingof epistemology constrain one another, and may provide a theory-drivenroute by which to settle questions about the possibility ofunconscious attentiveness.

The claim that all attention is conscious attention sits uneasily withcertain empirical results indicating that consciousness is notrequired for the operation of those psychological processes that areresponsible for certain effects that are usually taken to besignatures of attention. In an experiment by Yi Jianget al.,(2006), for example, participants are presented withattention-attracting stimuli in such a way that, thanks to anarrangement of mirrors, these stimuli are given to just one eye.Because a more vivid stimulus is presented to the other eye, andbecause this more vivid stimulus wins the competition forconsciousness that occurs in such cases of binocular rivalry, theseexperimental participants do not consciously experience the less vividstimulus. Those unconsciously processed stimuli include eroticphotographs. And those photographs do seem to elicit shifts ofattention, despite being unseen, as is evidenced by the fact thatconsciously experienced stimuli that are presented in the samelocation as these unseen attention-grabbers are more accuratelyresponded to in an attention demanding task (involving detecting theorientation of gabor-patches). One striking finding from Jiangetal.’s experiments is that the way in which these unseenphotographs attract and repel attention depends on the sexualorientation of the experimental participants.

A natural interpretation of these experiments is as showing that theerotic pictures capture the participants’ attention, despite thefact that those participants have no conscious experience of them.This suggests—although it does not conclusivelydemonstrate—that one may be attending to a thing without beingconscious of it. The same conclusion is suggested by a quite differentset of experiments involving a patient with blindsight. Theseexperiments show that, even though the blindsighted patient has noexperience of cues presented in his scotoma, those cues can elicit thefacilitation of processing and reduction of reaction times that areusually taken to be the signatures of attention (Kentridge &Heywood, 2001, Kentridgeet al., 2004).

One complaint against both these lines of evidence is that they do notenable us to distinguish between attention to a thing and attentionthat is directed to a part of space (in which that thing happens tobe), with the result that they cannot demonstrate attentionto athing in the absence of consciousness of that same thing (Mole,2008a). Research by Liam Norman, Charles Heywood and Robert Kentridgegoes some way towards addressing this complaint. Norman, Heywood andKentridge present normal participants with a screen showing an arrayof small, rapidly flickering Gabor patches. Objects the boundaries ofwhich are defined by changes in the orientations of these patches arenot consciously experienced: Participants merely see the whole screenas a flickering array of patches. Cues that direct the attention ofthose participants do nonetheless seem to draw attention to theseunseen objects, as indicated by differences in the response times toitems that are subsequently presented in and outside of theirboundaries (Norman, Heywood & Kentridge, 2013).

Such experiments show that there is an influence operating betweenunconscious processing and the direction of attention, and perhapsindicate that attention can be paid to objects that make no showing inconscious experience (Mole, 2014a). They therefore place a limit onthe closeness of the relationship that can be claimed to exist betweenattention and consciousness.

The disputes about whether attention is sufficient for consciousness,necessary for consciousness, or both, are related to questions aboutattention’s metaphysics. The claim that attention is notsufficient for consciousness is typically made as part of a defence ofthe idea that attention and consciousness are underpinned by twodistinct brain processes, which can occur independently (see, e.g.,Koch and Tsuchiya, 2007). The claim that the things to which we attendare a proper subset of the things that appear in our consciousness isrequired by those who, like Locke (see Section1.3), think that there is a process of conscious thinking, and that thisconstitutes attention when it happens in a certain way. And the claim that attention is both necessary and sufficient forconsciousness is required by those who think that the process by whichthings come to consciousness is identical to the process by whichattention is allocated (Prinz, 2005, 2011). Some scientific theoriesof consciousness also carry strong commitments concerning itsrelationship to attention: Taylor Webb and Michael Graziano emphasizethese commitments in making the empirical case for their‘Attention-Schema’ theory, according to whichconsciousness emerges from processes in which the control of attentionrequires a schematic representation of the way in which attention isbeing allocated (Graziano and Webb, 2014; Webb and Graziano,2015).

3.1.3 How Does Attention Modulate Phenomenology?

Whether or not one thinks that attention is always responsible forbringing things into our consciousness, there are good reasons tothink that changes in the direction of our attention can make somedifference to the character of conscious experience. Phenomenologistsand Gestalt psychologists have characterized this difference invarious ways, with Maurice Merleau-Ponty emphasizing the way in whichattention can configure the figure/ground structure of perceived space(Merleau-Ponty, 1962, Chp.3–4), and Aron Gurwitsch (Gurwitsch,1964) elaborating a theory in which the configuration given byattention has a more complex, three-part structure (explained inArvidson, 2006). In the second half of his 2017 book, Sebastian Watzldevelops a similar suggestion, on the basis of his claim that the roleof attention is to impose a priority structure on our mental lives(see above§2.4), (Watzl, 2011, 2017).

There is currently some dispute about whether the differences made byshifts of attention can be adequately characterized as differences inthecontent of the attended experience. If, as Watzlcontends, they cannot, then phenomena of attention create a seriousdifficulty for any fully general attempts to explain the character ofconscious experience by reference to the contents represented in it(Chalmers, 2004). Such explanations might still be viable incircumscribed domains (Speaks, 2010).

A series of studies by Marisa Carrasco and her collaborators haveexamined the influence of attention on the character of consciousexperience. These have revealed that the phenomenal differencesproduced by shifts of attention include differences of perceivedbrightness, contrast, and saturation of colours, but do not includedifferences of hue (Carrasco, Ling & Read, 2004, Fuller &Carrasco, 2006). Ned Block has suggested that these perceiveddifferences should not be thought of as differences in thecontent of experience, since to characterize them in that waywould be to take it that attending to an item creates an illusion asto its brightness, contrast, etc.; a result which he takes to beimplausible. Block therefore interprets Carrasco’s findings asindicating an aspect of experience that cannot be accounted for with atheory in which the phenomenal character of an experience is afunction of that experience’s content (Block 2010).

There have been similar disputes, transacted on the basis of moreintrospective considerations, concerning the effects of attention onthe perception of ambiguous figures (such as the Necker Cube). Inresponse to some considerations that were first raised by FionaMacpherson (Macpherson, 2006), Bence Nanay has suggested that theeffects of attention on the perception of such figures can beexplained by those who maintain that every difference in consciousnessis a difference of content (Nanay, 2010, 2011). His contention is thatthe effects of attention on the character of conscious experienceshould be understood as including a modulation of the specificity ofan experience’s content, in which the representations ofdeterminable properties are made more or less determinate. The issueshere are similar to those concerning the way in which blurrinessshould be thought to enter into visual experience (see Section 4.4 ofthe entry onrepresentational theories of consciousness).

Mattia Riccardi casts attention in a rather different phenomenologicalrole, suggesting (in opposition to the proposal of Matthen, 2010) thatattention explains thepresentness that differentiatesone’s perceptual experiences of real objects in one’simmediate environment from one’s experiences of objects that areseen in photographs, or that are pictured by the mind’s eyeduring episodes of vivid imagination (Riccardi, 2019).

3.2 Attention and Demonstrative Reference

Consciousness is only one of the philosophically puzzling mentalphenomena that have been thought to be related to attention in waysthat may prove to be explanatorily revealing.Demonstrativereference is another. One advocate of the idea that attentioncontributes to the explanation of demonstrative reference is JohnCampbell, who writes that:

… the notion of conscious attention to an object has anexplanatory role to play: it has to explain how it is that we haveknowledge of the reference of a demonstrative. (2002, 45)

A similar idea was explored in the manuscript on Theory of Knowledgethat Bertrand Russell abandoned (under the influence of Wittgenstein)in the summer in 1913. In that work Russell gives the followingstatement of the idea that reference to particulars requires attentionto them:

At any moment of my conscious life, there is one object (or at mostsome very small number of objects) to which I am attending. Allknowledge of particulars radiates out from this object. (1913, 40)

In support of the Russellian claim that there is an explanatoryrelation between attention and demonstrative reference, Campbelldevelops two lines of thought.

His first line of thought comes from reflection on examples concerningthe requirements that have to be met in order to understanddemonstrative expressions in conversational contexts where one of theparticipants in the conversation uses expressions such as ‘thatwoman’, but where various women are present, all of whom arepossible referents for this demonstrative. Knowing which women ismeant, according to Campbell, requires attending to the woman inquestion and knowing that it is to her that the speaker was attending.This is intended to show more than just that the direction of thespeaker’s attention is a possible source of evidence for whatthat speaker means. It is intended as showing that attention andreference stand in a particularly intimate relationship—arelationship that Campbell characterizes by saying that‘knowledge of the reference of a demonstrative is provided byconscious attention to the object’ (p. 22).

The second line of thought that Campbell develops in support of theview that attention explains demonstrative reference is one pertainingto deductive arguments in which the premises refer to items that arepicked out by demonstratives: Arguments such as ‘(1) That is F.(2) That is G. Therefore (3) That is F and G’. Campbell’sthought here is that such arguments depend for their validity on therebeing no possibility of equivocating on the meaning of‘that’, as it occurs in the two separate premises. Sucharguments can only figure in rationally-entitling reasoning so long asthere is a single fixing of the referent of ‘that’ in bothpremises. This reference fixing, Campbell thinks, is achieved if andonly if there is no redirection of attention between the premises.Again this is intended to show more than just that there is somecausal or evidential relation between attending and referring. It isintended to show that the role played by attention in fixing thereference of a demonstrative is analogous to the role played by aFregean Sense in fixing the reference of a proper name (Campbell,2002, Chapter 5).

The explanatory approach that Campbell advocates, and that Russellconsidered, has traditionally been thought to suffer from a problem ofcircularity. This problem was urged by Peter Geach inMentalActs (1957). Geach considers the suggestion that we can useattention to explain our ability to make reference to the things thatwe perceive, but thinks that no such suggestion can provide a genuineexplanation of reference because:

… it is quite useless to say the relevant sense-perceptionsmust be attended to, either this does not give a sufficient condition,or else “attended to” is a mere word for the very relationof judgment to sense perception that requires analysis. (1957, 64)

Geach’s threat of circularity can be avoided if an independentlygiven theory of how attention is constituted can be shown toilluminate the way in which reference is fixed by it. Imogen Dickiehas attempted to show just this. In a 2011 paper Dickie shows thatcognitive psychology provides us with a theory of the role played byattention in tracking objects over time. She suggests that such atheory can be used to account for the way in which attending to anobject removes any knowledge-defeating component of luck from ourinferences involving it, thereby establishing the attended object as apossible topic of demonstrative thoughts (Dickie, 2011, 2015). Thistreatment of attention exemplifies some of the central themes inDickie’s more general attempt to explain how thoughts come to beabout ordinary objects (and so how singular terms come to refer tothose objects). The explanation that she offers is one in which athought comes to be about a thing when the justificatory practices inwhich that thought figures are anchored to the object in question (ina sense of ‘anchoring’ that Dickie spells out in detail(Dickie, 2015)).

Whether or not a theory of attention can be turned into a non-circularexplanation of demonstrative reference, the idea that attention andreference are related does seem to cast light on what goes on when weunderstand referring expressions. Campbell’s examples succeed insuggesting that what we attend to and what we refer to are often thesame. There is also some empirical evidence, coming from developmentalpsychology, indicating that attention-related abilities play a crucialrole in the infant’s development of an understanding of itscaregiver’s demonstrative use (seeSection 3.3). Lessons have been drawn from this that are not only about thecomprehension of linguistic expressions. This developmental work hasalso been taken to imply something about our grasp on directlyreferringthoughts. The idea here – as in the work ofDickie and Campbell – is not only that attention contributes toour production and comprehension of linguistic expressions that haveparticular referents, but that it also contributes to theestablishment of those referents as the contents of our thoughts. Inaddition to these developmental considerations, Michael Barkasi hassuggested that the nature of attention’s contribution to fixingthe reference of thoughts can be illuminated by considering thepattern of neural projections to the frontal eye fields. WhereasCampbell characterizes attention inepistemic terms, Barkasifavours a sub-doxastic characterization, in which attention‘sets targets’ and thereby regulates the flow of visualinformation (Barkasi, 2019).

3.3 Attention and Other Minds

There are empirical results, coming from developmental psychology,which are suggestive of an intimate link between the development ofvarious abilities related to attention and the development of variouscapacities that are involved in understanding the mental states thatare expressed in interactions between the infant and itscaregiver.

An ability to appreciate what others are attending to appears to be acrucial stage in a normal infant’s development towardsunderstanding the fact that its caregivers’ utterances havereferential intentions behind them. More generally, capacities forattention develop at important milestones on the route to theacquisition of some distinctively human cognitive capacities (Mooreand Dunham, 1995). There is a distinctive developmental pathway inwhich normal human infants develop an ability and a willingness toattend to their mother, an ability and willingness to attend to thething that she is attending to, and then, most importantly, an abilityand willingness to enter into episodes in which there is a thirdobject that mother and child are attending tojointly, withmutual understanding of the fact that their attention is shared(Reddy, 2010, Trevarthen, 2011). In these episodes infants andcaregivers employ complex cues, involving speech, gaze-following, andpointing.

There is good evidence that the child’s progression along thispathway is related to its development of abilities to respondappropriately to the mental states of others, and to the developmentof its ability to acquire new vocabulary on the basis of anunderstanding of what the words used by its mother refer to. Alongitudinal study suggests that the earlier stages in this pathwayare predictive of the age at which infants reach the later ones– thereby providing some evidence for the hypothesis that thissequence is a causal one – with the mastery at twelve months ofpointing as a means to direct the attention of others being predictiveof false belief understanding at the age of fifty months, even whenfactors relating to temperament and language are factored out (Sodian& Kristen-Antonow, 2015). Another source of evidence comes fromthe fact that the arrested development of these attention-involvingabilities is a revealing marker of the impairments suffered byautistic children (Kanner, 1943, Hobson and Hobson, 2011). Further evidence may also come from the fact that a lack of suchabilities is related to limitations in the mental-state attributionabilities of non-human primates, although this last claim is morecontroversial (Call & Tomasello, 2005).

Some progress has been made towards extracting philosophical lessonsfrom the empirical work indicating that joint attention has a role toplay here, in the explanation of distinctively human aspects ofcognitive and social development, and also – once thatdevelopment is complete – in the explanation of the way in whichsome elementary social phenomena are transacted. (For severaldevelopmental examples, see the papers collected in Eilan,etal. 2005, and Seemann 2011; for a discussion of joint attentionin adult cases of shared intention, see Fiebich and Gallagher, 2012,who argue that jointly attending has a basic, elementary status, asthe most minimal instance of a joint action.)

One of the points at which philosophical difficulties arise is incharacterizing thesharedness of the attention that isimplicated in this developmental trajectory. Christopher Peacocke hasargued that the way in which joint attention episodes are sharedinvolves a kind of reciprocal recognition of the other’srecognition of one’s own attention, and that it thereforeinvolves a kind of mutual openness that is analogous to the opennessof ‘common knowledge’, as that notion figures inphilosophical analyses of communication and convention (see the entryonconvention). Since joint attention is achieved by young children, its achievementcannot plausibly be thought to make any sophisticated intellectualdemands. Peacocke therefore argues that awareness of reciprocatedopenness must be more fundamental than the intellectual achievement ofcommon knowledge. He suggests that it should instead beunderstood as a variety ofperceptual awareness that makessuch common knowledge possible (Peacocke, 2005). John Campbell sharesPeacocke’s view of joint attention as being a perceptualphenomenon, as opposed to a phenomenon that is achieved whenone’s perception is reflected on in a certain way, but Campbelldiffers from Peacocke in taking the person with whom attention isshared to be fellowsubject of the joint experience, not anobject who figures in thecontent of the experience that eachjoint-attender individually has (Campbell, 2002, Ch. 8).Campbell’s attempt to shift the explanation of sharedness fromthe cognitive to the perceptual domain is rejected by Lucas Battichand Bart Geurts (Battich and Guerts, 2020), who suggest thatCampbell’s view suffers from problems that originate in hisrelational conception of perception. They therefore claim that theissues here cast light on the long-running debates betweenrepresentation-based and relation-based theories of perception (seethe entry onthe problem of perception).

3.4 Attention and Knowledge

The apparent links between attention and demonstrative reference (seesection3.2) and attention and knowledge of other minds (see section3.3) might be special instances of a more general connection betweenattention and the making of epistemic moves. A general connection ofthat sort may have been what Descartes had in mind when he suggestedthat attention to clear and distinct ideas is a necessary conditionfor those ideas to realize their special epistemic potential (seeSection1.1). It might also be what Stewart had in mind when he suggested that“Some attention [is] necessary for any act of memorywhatever” (see Section1.4). Kant’s anthropological writings also cast attention in acrucial epistemic role, as explaining the control that one can exertover representations in thought and in imagination, where this perhapsincludes the kind of imagination that Kant takes to be involved inmaking one’s experiences into experiences of an objectivespatiotemporal world (Merritt & Valaris, 2017).

Although each of these philosophers have tended to frame it in a waythat reflects their other theoretical commitments, some version of theidea that attention is always involved in the making of epistemicmoves can be made pre-theoretically plausible. The inattentionalblindness experiments, in which participants are visually presentedwith large changes while attending to something else, show thatinattentive people can fail to notice all sorts of perceivable thingsthat attentive people would find obvious. Something exactly similarseems to be true in the case of a priori reasoning: just as no item isso large, so central, and so well-lit that no conscious and sightedobserver could miss it, so there is no step in reasoning that is sosimple, so compelling, and so obvious, that every thinker, whetherattentive or inattentive, can be expected to recognise it. Just as theinattentional blindness effects might seem to show that there areattentional demands that a thinker has to meet before his perceptualencounter with things can provide him with knowledge of them, so it isplausible that there are similar attentional demands that have to bemet before the thinker’s grasp of a thought gives her ajustified belief in that thought’s consequences. Thisinterpretation of the inattentional blindness effects is, however,controversial. Nicholas Silins and Susanna Siegel have suggested that– even if inattention does sometimes explain a perceivingperson’s failure to form a belief about the things happening intheir visual field – unattended aspects of experience arenonetheless capable of providing justification for such beliefs(Silins and Sigel, 2019). Émile Thalbard argues to the contrary(Thalabard, 2020).

In both the a priori case and the perceptual case, the acquisition ofknowledge seems to require attention on at least some occasions, andin both of these cases that requirement seems to be apractical one. It may be that knowledge of some propositionsis required if one’s experience with a gorilla is to provide onewith knowledge of the gorilla’s presence (with the propositionshere being of a sort that could serve as a major premise in aninference by which one’s perceptual experience was interpreted),but the requirement on gaining knowledge from experience cannot bethat one must be bearing such propositions in mind. The same is truein the a priori domain. What is required before an a priorientitlement can be recognized cannot be that one has to entertain someprior knowledge of a proposition from which that entitlement can bededuced. To suppose that occurrent propositional knowledge is what isnecessary for such moves would be to embark on the regress set byLewis Carroll’s tortoise to Achilles (Carroll, 1895). Whatepistemic move-making requires is not occurrent knowledge of aproposition. The thing that it requires is the right sort of activeattention.

The attentional requirements that have to be met before one canacquire knowledge from experience or recognize an a priori entitlementare not requirements merely for alertness. They are not capturedmerely by saying that, in order to gain knowledge, the thinker has topay some attention to the relevant ideas. A thinker may be attendingto a syllogism, but, if he is attending to its rhythm, he may still beunable to see that the conclusion follows. A non-question beggingcharacterisation of the attentional requirements of knowledgeacquisition in general would be an important contribution toepistemology. Current work on attention, focussing as it does onattention as a perceptual phenomenon, may give us only part of thegeneral theory that we need. Work on the purely intellectual forms ofattention continues to be scarce. This shortcoming has been emphasizedby Mark Fortney, who argues that the neglect of intellectual attentionhas led philosophers to misinterpret some of the claims made in theempirical literature on attention and consciousness (Fortney, 2019).Fortney also claims that considerations pertaining to intellectualattention should have a central role in debates about the transparencyof phenomenology, and about the consequences of this transparency forthe epistemology of self-attributed thoughts (debates that areexemplified, in Fortney’s discussion, by Byrne, 2018). Fortneysuggests that, when attention is given this role, certain results fromcognitive psychology cast light on these debates. He thinks, when seenin this light, some of the claims that have been made about thetransparency of occurrent thought start to seem dubious (Fortney,2020).

3.5 Attention and Voluntary Action

Attention’s involvement in voluntaryaction is a lotharder to study in a controlled experiment than its involvement inperception. The theories of attention emerging from experimentalpsychology have, as a result, focused almost exclusively onattention’s perceptual instances. In this respect they contrastwith theories that were developed in the period before psychology andphilosophy split, in which the action-involving aspects of attentionwere much more prominent. William James, for example, suggests in thePrinciples of Psychology that ‘volition is nothing butattention’ (James, 1890 p. 424), and at one time (in what mightbe read as an anticipation of the competition-based theories discussedabove, in§2.6) he proposed that “Attention, belief, affirmation, and motorvolition, are […] four names for an identical process,incidental to the conflict of ideas alone, the survival of one inspite of the opposition of the others.” (1880).

The issues surrounding attention’s relationship to thevoluntariness of action are parallel to some of the issues surroundingattention’s relationship to the consciousness of perception. Itseems natural to think that attention is necessary for the voluntaryperformance of finely tuned behaviours, much as it seems necessary forthe conscious perception of fine detail. But it does not seem naturalto think that we must be paying attention to the execution of everyact that we voluntarily perform, any more than it seem natural tosuppose that we must pay attention in order to be consciouslyperceiving anything at all. A case could therefore be made, oncommonsense grounds, for claiming that attention figures in theproduction of some but not all voluntary behaviours. One can imaginethis view being challenged by a theorist who claimed that attention isnecessary for any action to be voluntary, arguing that there is anillusion (analogous to the refrigerator light illusion) that gives usthe mistaken impression that our inattentive acts are voluntary too.As in the case of attention and consciousness, there is amethodological puzzle (with epistemologically deep roots) about thesort of evidence that could settle this issue. This may be a topic forfuture research. While resisting the idea that attention is eithernecessary or sufficient for an act to be voluntary, Denis Buehler hasargued that there is a central role for attention in the explanationof flexible goal-directed behaviour (Buehler, 2019). In cases wherethat behaviour involves the exercise of a skill, Alex Dayer andCarolyn Jennings have argued against the idea that any simple accountof attention’s role in it can be given, claiming that a theoryof attention’s role in skilled performance must instead be‘pluralist’ (Dayer & Jennings, 2021).

The separation of attention’s role in action fromattention’s role in perception is somewhat artificial,especially when the perception in question is perception ofone’s own moving body. Psychological research into thatparticular form of perception has been largely independent of researchinto the role of attention in vision and audition. A 2016 paper byGregor Hochstetter reviews the research into this bodily case, andargues, following Marcel Kinsbourne (1995, 2002) that internalrepresentation of a ‘body image’ must play some role inguiding attention during normal bodily awareness (Hochstetter,2016).

4 Attention and Value

Attention’s contribution to our understanding of values has beenrelatively underexplored in the recent literature. The range ofvalue-theoretic contexts in which attention makes an explanatorilysignificant appearance is nonetheless broad.

4.1 Attention in Aesthetics

The subject matter of aesthetics can be demarcated in various ways,each of which is somewhat controversial (see Lopes, 2014). A naturalthought here is that aesthetics might be identified as the branch ofphilosophy that is concerned with one particular sort of experience.If this proposal is to be informative then it obviously needs to besupplemented with some specification of which sort of experience thatis. It is clear that this specification cannot be given via anextensional specification of the objects that are experienced: thesame wine might be experienced by the connoisseur and the thirsty man,with only one of their experiences being aesthetic; the same paintingmight be seen aesthetically by the art lover, and from a purelyfinancial point of view by its dealer.

One response to this would be individuate experiences more finely thantheir objects, by instead identifying some particular set ofproperties that are experienced as belonging to those objectsin the aesthetic case (see the section on aesthetic objects in theentry onthe concept of the aesthetic). An alternative response would be to consider not only the contentsthat are experienced, but also the way in which the subjectexperiences them, perhaps by identifying some particularattitude that characterises the subject in the aestheticcase, or perhaps by identifying some mode of attention that thatsubject instantiates (see the section on the aesthetic attitude in theentry onthe concept of the aesthetic).

Attempts to identify such an aesthetic mode of attention arewell-represented in the philosophical tradition. Kant’s famousclaims about judgements of beauty having a first moment ofdisinterested pleasure are usually read as a paradigm of theattitude-identifying approach (see the entry onKant’s aesthetics and teleology), but Jessica Williams has argued that Kant must also be operating witha notion of aesthetic attention, as being a mode of attentioninvolving a distinctive combination of imagination and understanding(Williams, 2021).

Some such notion of attention also plays a central role in R.G.Collingwood’s account of the way in which art (and, inparticular, literature) contributes positively to a society’sculture. Collingwood describes attention as “the assertion ofourselves as the owners of our feelings”, and takes thisself-assertion to be crucial in enabling us to exercise volition overthose feelings, so that “Their brute power over us is thusreplaced by our power over them” (Collingwood, 1938, p. 222).Collingwood therefore takes the diminution of a society’sartistic culture to make it vulnerable to emotive influences (whilehimself suggesting that this might best read, not as a broadphilosophical claim, but as a point about Europe in the nineteenthirties).

Attempts to demarcate the aesthetic via the identification of anaesthetic attitude, or of an aesthetic mode of attention, have beenattacked — for their details, and for their more generalorientation (most famously by George Dickie, in his 1964 paper). Thoselines of attack have led to a widespread acceptance of the idea thatthere is something wrongheaded about specifying necessary andsufficient conditions for qualifying as aesthetic via theidentification of some particular aesthetic attitude. Manyphilosophers nonetheless retain the idea that there are informativethings that can be said, in the service of less strictly definedtheoretical ends, about the sorts of attitudes that are often found tobe exemplified in aesthetic cases. It is in this spirit that someideas about distinctive forms of aesthetic attention have recentlybeen revived.

Servaas van der Berg suggests that a distinctive mode of attention canbe seen in cases of aesthetic appreciation (van der Berg, 2019). Heclaims that this mode of attention is distinguished by itsmotivational structure, which has a form that is similar to themotivational structure of game playing, as theorised by Bernard Suits(Suits, 1978) and Thi Nguyen (Nguyen, 2020). This structure is onethat inverts the normal order of priorities between means and ends: innormal actions one’s means are typically taken in order to bringabout one’s ends, but the game-playing golfer (for example)instead adopts the end of getting his ball into a hole in order thathe can take the means to reaching that end. Van der Berg argues that asimilar inversion is seen in aesthetic appreciation, where thecognitive means that are required in order to reach understandingprovide the reasons for adopting the end of understanding an item thatis being appreciated aesthetically.

Bence Nanay has set out a position with similar aims — notaspiring to give necessary or sufficient conditions for the aesthetic,but aiming to cast some light on the way in which certain centralcases of aesthetic experience operate. He does this by giving a theoryof the distinctive way in which our attention is engaged in the courseof these experiences. Nanay emphasizes the psychological distinctionbetween focused and distributed attention, and uses examples from arange of arts to suggest that aesthetic experiences often requireattention of both sorts. He also suggests this contributes tothe value that we place on such experiences (Nanay, 2015, 2016).

4.2 Attention in Ethics

Simone Weil suggests that attention has an absolutely central role inethics, and in value theory more broadly, writing that:

The authentic and pure values – truth, beauty and goodness– in the activity of a human being are the result of one and thesame act, a certain application of the full attention to the object.(Weil, 1986, p. 214)

This apotheosizing of attention provides the basis for Weil’sclaims about priorities for education. On these points, her positionis shared by a number of other figures whose work sits at theinterface of philosophy and literature (see Mole, 2017). ChristopherThomas has suggested that the role played by attention in Weil’s‘ethics of affliction’ can be interpreted as an attempt toput some central notions from Kant’s aesthetic theory to ethicalwork (Thomas, 2020).

The influence of Kant was in the foreground, together with theinteractions between ethics and aesthetics, when Weil’s claimsabout attention’s import were developed in the work of IrisMurdoch. Murdoch suggests that there are certain forms of attentionthat play an essential role in the exercise of the virtues (Murdoch,1970, see Bagnoli, 2003, Mole, 2006). She implies that a capacity forthese forms of attention can be cultivated through experiences ofbeauty. These themes have been taken up by Dorothea Debus, who placesparticular emphasis on Weil’s claim that it isfullattention to which cardinal value is attributed (Debus, 2015). AntonyFredriksson and Silvia Panizza suggest that the aspects of attentionthat Murdoch takes to be important are seen with particular clarity ifone adopts the perspective of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account ofattention, in which theopenness of the attentive mind isemphasized (Fredriksson & Panizza, 2020). Nicolas Bommarito hasdeveloped an account of modesty along broadly Murdochian lines, asbeing a ‘virtue of attention’. He argues that this avoidsepistemic difficulties that other accounts of modesty face, if theyinstead characterize modesty as requiring false beliefs about theextent of one’s strengths (Bommarito, 2013).

Similar issues are approached from a somewhat different direction byPeter Goldie (Goldie, 2004), and Michael Brady (Brady, 2010), both ofwho relate attention and virtue to the epistemic significance of aperson’s emotional life. Both Goldie and Brady suggest that theattention-modulating profile of an emotion is essential to it, andboth claim that this modulation of attention by emotion plays anineliminable role in our having a full appreciation of the evaluativeproperties that we encounter in the world around us. Goldie and Bradydisagree as to how this epistemic role should be characterized, withGoldie taking the experience of one’s own emotion to itself be areason-giving experience, with an epistemic authority analogous toone’s experiences of the things in one’s visual field,whereas Brady takes the emotional subject’s experience of itemsin the world to have an epistemic authority that is not shared by thesubject’s experience of their own emotional state, so that thatstate’s epistemic significance must instead be exhausted by itsinfluence on our outwardly-directed attention (Brady, 2013).

4.3 Attention in Social and Political Theory

Many theorists and commentators have noted that some of the largestbusinesses are, like Google and Facebook, ones that receive verylittle money from the end-users of their best known products, but thatdo receive an enormous amount of attention from those users. Writerswho have noted this have often taken it to be symptomatic of acondition that contributes centrally to the currentzeitgeist(Williams, 2018, Odell, 2019). This contribution is typically taken tobe a deleterious one. Michael Goldhaber seems to have been among thefirst to describe this condition as a shift from an ‘informationeconomy’ to an ‘attention economy’ (Goldhaber,1997), following Herbert Simon’s suggestion one might give aneconomic construal of the fact that attention becomes scarce wheninformation is abundant (Simon, 1971).

The suggestion that the present century has seen a distinctivecommodification of attention has become widespread. This shift hasbeen theorized using the conceptual resources of various social andpolitical philosophies. Jonathan Beller exemplifies a broadly Marxistapproach, by offering an ‘attention theory of value’(Beller 2006). Clinton Castro and Adam Pham draw on Debra Satz’snotion of ‘noxious markets’ to argue that technologiesdesigned to maximize attentive engagement should be regulated in waysanalogous to the regulation of the tobacco industry (Castro &Pham, 2020, drawing on Satz, 2010). Georg Franck uses concepts drawnfrom the work of Levinas and Heidegger to give an account of theattention economy’s role in mediating our transactions of mutualrecognition and respect (Franck, 1998).

The technologies that have driven this social change do indeed haveeffects on attention. Empirical studies that have measured theseeffects have tended to frame them with reference to their downstreamsocial consequences, rather than their immediate cognitive basis.Rosen, Carrier and Cheever, for example, observe the effects of socialmedia use on the study habits of students at school and university,and relate these effects to educational performance, in order tosuggest some pedagogical strategies by which these effects might beameliorated (Rosen et al, 2013). Such theorists have made relativelylittle theoretical contact with the accounts of attention offered byphilosophers or cognitive psychologists, although there are some (suchas Atchley and Lane, 2014) who refer to a bottleneck theory ofattention, in order to explain the way in which attention-demandingtechnologies reduce the attention that is available for other purposes(see§2.1, above). Rather than referring to theories of the cognitive basis ofattention, claims about the psychological effects of the attentioneconomy have often been framed with reference to theories of thepsychological basis of addiction (e.g., Bharvaga and Velsquez,2020).

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Classics in The History of Psychology, maintained by Christopher D. Green, York University, Canada. Completetext of many classic works in psychology, including WilliamJames’s Principles of Psychology.
Reference Guide: Inattentional Blindness, maintained by Brian Scholl, Yale University. A comprehensivebibliography of psychological research on inattentional blindness.Also includes a link to online demonstrations of the inattentionalblindness effects.
Reference Guide: Multiple Object Tracking, maintained by Brian Scholl, Yale University. a comprehensivebibliography of psychological research on multiple object tracking.Also includes a link to online demonstations of multiple objecttracking tasks.
Attention, Scholarpedia article curated by Lawrence Ward, University of BritishColumbia, Canada.
The Attention Trove, maintained by David Landes (Duke University). A collection of linksto a diverse range of writings on attention, from a variety ofdisciplinary perspectives, hosted byThe Friends ofAttentions, an international collective of those interested inactivism that challenges the current economics of attention.

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