No one knows what attention is
Top Cited Papers
Open Access
- 5 September 2019
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics
- Vol. 81 (7), 2288-2303
- https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-019-01846-w
Abstract
In this article, we challenge the usefulness of “attention” as a unitary construct and/or neural system. We point out that the concept has too many meanings to justify a single term, and that “attention” is used to refer to both the explanandum (the set of phenomena in need of explanation) and the explanans (the set of processes doing the explaining). To illustrate these points, we focus our discussion on visual selective attention. It is argued that selectivity in processing has emerged through evolution as a design feature of a complex multi-channel sensorimotor system, which generates selective phenomena of “attention” as one of many by-products. Instead of the traditional analytic approach to attention, we suggest a synthetic approach that starts with well-understood mechanisms that do not need to be dedicated to attention, and yet account for the selectivity phenomena under investigation. We conclude that what would serve scientific progress best would be to drop the term “attention” as a label for a specific functional or neural system and instead focus on behaviorally relevant selection processes and the many systems that implement them.Keywords
This publication has 136 references indexed in Scilit:
- Deficits in reach target selection during inactivation of the midbrain superior colliculusProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2011
- The role of a midbrain network in competitive stimulus selectionCurrent Opinion in Neurobiology, 2011
- Motor Functions of the Superior ColliculusAnnual Review of Neuroscience, 2011
- Value-driven attentional captureProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2011
- Attention, Intention, and Priority in the Parietal LobeAnnual Review of Neuroscience, 2010
- Free choice activates a decision circuit between frontal and parietal cortexNature, 2008
- Posterior Parietal Cortex Encodes Autonomously Selected Motor PlansNeuron, 2007
- Cortical mechanisms of action selection: the affordance competition hypothesisPhilosophical Transactions B, 2007
- The Cortical Motor SystemNeuron, 2001
- Coding of intention in the posterior parietal cortexNature, 1997