Attention: accept, reject, or major revisions?

Symposium: Friday, May 17, 2024, 2:30 – 4:30 pm, Talk Room 2

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Organizers: Alon Zivony¹; ¹University of Sheffield
Presenters: Britt Anderson, Ruth Rosenholtz, Wayne Wu, Sarah Shomstein, Alon Zivony

Is attention research in crisis? After more than a century, we have come full circle from the intuition that “everybody knows what attention is” (James, 1890) to the conclusion that “nobody knows what attention is” (Hommel et al., 2019). It has been suggested that attention is an incoherent and sterile concept, or unsuitable for scientific research. And yet, attention research continues as strongly as ever with little response to these critiques. Is the field ignoring glaring theoretical problems, or does the current conception of attention merely require some revisions? In this symposium, our speakers bring different perspectives to examine this critical question. Rather than merely raising issues with the concept of attention, each also suggests practical and theoretical solutions, which can hopefully inform future research. Each speaker will present either a critical view or defence of the concept of attention, and suggest whether attention should be abandoned, kept as is, or redefined. Our first two speakers will argue that scientists may be better off without the concept of attention. Britt Anderson will criticize the use of attention as an explanation of observed phenomena. He will suggest that the common usage is non-scientific and results in circular logic. He offers in its place an attention-free account of so-called attention effects. Ruth Rosenholtz argues that recent work, for example on peripheral vision, calls into question many of the basic tenets of attention theory. She will talk about her year of banning ‘attention’ in order to rethink attention from the ground up. The second group of speakers will question common understanding of attention but will argue in favour of it as a scientific concept. Wayne Wu will suggest that our shared methodology of studying attention commits us to the Jamesonian functional conceptualization of attention. He will argue that attention can and should be retained if we locate it in the right level analysis in cognitive explanation. Sarah Shomstein will discuss “attentional platypuses”, empirical abnormalities that do not fit into current attention research. These abnormalities reveal the need for a new way of thinking about attention. Alon Zivony will argue that many of the conceptual problems with attention stem from the standard view that equates attention with selection. Moving away from this definition will allow us to retain attention but will also require a change in our thinking. Each talk will conclude with a take-home message about what attention is and isn’t, a verdict of whether it should be abandoned or retained, and suggestions of how their understanding of attention can be applied in future research. We will conclude with a panel discussion.

Talk 1

Attention: Idol of the Tribe

Britt Anderson¹; ¹Dept of Psychology and Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, University of Waterloo

The term ’attention’ has been a drag on our science ever since the early days of experimental psychology. Our frequent offerings and sacrifices (articles and the debates they provoke), and our unwillingness to abandon our belief in this reified entity indicates the aptness of the Jamesian phrase ”idol of the tribe.” While causal accounts of attention are empty, attention might be, as suggested by Hebb, a useful label. It could be used to indicate that some experimental observable is not immediately explained by the excitation of receptor cells. However, labeling of something as ’attention’ means there is something to be explained; not that something has been explained. Common experimental manipulations used to provoke visual selective attention: instructions, cues, and reward are in fact the guide to explaining away ’attention’. The observations provoked by such manipulations frequently induce behavioral performance differences not explainable in terms of differences in retinal stimulation. These manipulations are economically summarized as components of a process in which base rates, evidence, value, and plausibility combine to determine perceptual experience. After briefly reviewing the history of how attention has been confusing from the start, I will summarize the notion of conceptual fragmentation and show how it applies. I will then review how the traditional conditions of an attentional experiment provide the basis for a superior, attention free, account of the phenomena of interest, and I will present some of the opportunities for the use of more formal descriptions that should lead to better theoretically motivated experimental investigations.

Talk 2

Attention in Crisis

Ruth Rosenholtz¹; ¹NVIDIA Research

Recent research on peripheral vision has led to a paradigm-shifting conclusion: that vision science as a field must rethink the concept of visual attention. Research has uncovered significant anomalies not explained by existing theories, and some methods for studying attention may instead have uncovered mechanisms of peripheral vision. Nor can a summary statistic representation in peripheral vision solve these problems on its own. A year of banning “attention” in my lab allowed us to rethink attention from the ground up; this talk will conclude with some of the resulting insights.

Talk 3

Attention Unified

Wayne Wu¹; ¹Department of Philosophy and Neuroscience Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

For over a century, scientists have expressed deep misgivings about attention. A layperson would find this puzzling, for they know what attention is as well as those with sight know what seeing is. People visually attend all the time. Attention is real, we know what it is, and we can explain it. I shall argue that the problem of attention concerns the conceptual and logical structure of the scientific theory of attention. Because of shared methodology, we are committed to a single functional conception of attention, what William James articulated long ago. I show how this shared conception provides a principle of unification that links empirical work. To illustrate this, I show how two cueing paradigms tied to “external” and “internal” attention, spatial cueing and retro-cueing, are instances of the same kind of attention. Against common skepticism, I demonstrate that we are all committed to the existence of attention as a target of explanation. Yet in step with the skeptic, I show that attention is not an explainer in the sense that it is not a neural mechanism. Locating attention at the right level of analysis in cognitive explanation is key to understanding what it is and how science has made massive progress in understanding it.

Talk 4

What does a platypus have to do with attention?

Sarah Shomstein¹; ¹Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, George Washington University

Decades of research on understanding the mechanisms of attentional selection have focused on identifying the units (representations) on which attention operates in order to guide prioritized sensory processing. These attentional units fit neatly to accommodate our understanding of how attention is allocated in a top-down, bottom-up, or historical fashion. In this talk, I will focus on attentional phenomena that are not easily accommodated within current theories of attentional selection. We call these phenomena attentional platypuses, as they allude to an observation that within biological taxonomies the platypus does not fit into either mammal or bird categories. Similarly, attentional phenomena that do not fit neatly within current attentional models suggest that current models need to be revised. We list a few instances of the ‘attentional platypuses’ and then offer a new approach, that we term Dynamically Weighted Prioritization, stipulating that multiple factors impinge onto the attentional priority map, each with a corresponding weight. The interaction between factors and their corresponding weights determine the current state of the priority map which subsequently constrains/guides attention allocation. We propose that this new approach should be considered as a supplement to existing models of attention, especially those that emphasize categorical organizations.

Talk 5

It’s time to redefine attention

Alon Zivony¹; ¹Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield

Many models of attention assume that attentional selection takes place at a specific moment in time which demarcates the critical transition from pre-attentive to attentive processing of sensory inputs. In this talk, I will argue that this intuitively appealing assumption is not only incorrect, but it is also the reason behind the conceptual confusion about what attention is, and how it should be understood in psychological science. As an alternative, I will offer a “diachronic” framework that views attention as a modulatory process that unfolds over time, in tandem with perceptual processing. This framework breaks down the false dichotomy between pre-attentive and attentive processing, and as such, offers new solutions to old problems in attention research (the early vs. late selection debate). More importantly, by situating attention within a broader context of selectivity in the brain, the diachronic account can provide a unified and conceptually coherent account of attention. This will allow us to keep the concept of attention but will also require serious rethinking about how we use attention as a scientific concept.