About this topic
Summary

Attention is a central aspect of the mind. Like for other aspects of the mind, philosophers disagree on how to precisely characterize that aspect. Very generally speaking, attention concerns the current selective direction of the mind. Philosophy studies, for example: (a) The nature of attention. What exactly is attention? How are the various theories of attention in psychology and the neurosciences related to metaphysical nature of attention? (b) The explanatory role of attention. What is metaphysical or explanatory relationship between attention and other philosophically interesting aspects of our lives, such as consciousness, demonstrative reference, salience, agency and intentional action, mindfulness, or emotion, (c) The epistemological, aesthetic, ethical and political role of attention. What is the role of attention in the acquisition and exchange of knowledge, for rationality, or epistemic justification? Are certain forms of attention important for aesthetic appreciation? Does ethical virtue require a certain distribution of attention? Is there something problematic about the contemporary ‘attention economy’?

Key works

The treatment of attention in James 1890 is widely considered the classic in psychology. One of the most cited neuroscience works is Posner & Petersen 1990. Monograph length treatments of attention in contemporary philosophy include Mole 2011Watzl 2017 and Jennings 2020. For a specific focus on attention and consciousness, consider e.g. Block 2007, Prinz 2012, and Watzl 2017. For connections to demonstrative reference see Campbell 2002, Smithies 2011, and Dickie 2015. The role of attention for aesthetic experience is the topic of Nanay 2014. For attention and ethics see especially Murdoch 1970. For a popular treatment connecting attention with political issues see Williams 2018. Collections of works in the philosophy of attention and related issues are Mole et al 2011 and Archer 2022.

Introductions Wu 2014 for a book length introduction. For a shorter overview see the updated version of Mole 2010 and the somewhat older articles Watzl 2011a and Watzl 2011b.
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  1. Is the wandering mind a planning mind?Frederik T. Junker & Thor Grünbaum - forthcoming - Mind and Language.
    Recent studies on mind‐wandering reveal its potential role in goal exploration and planning future actions. How to understand these explorative functions and their impact on planning remains unclear. Given certain conceptions of intentions and beliefs, the explorative functions of mind‐wandering could lead to regular reconsideration of one's intentions. However, this would be in tension with the stability of intentions central to rational planning agency. We analyze the potential issue of excessive reconsideration caused by mind‐wandering. Our response resolves this tension, presenting (...)
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  2. What attention is. The priority structure account.Sebastian Watzl - 2023 - WIREs Cognitive Science 14 (1).
    'Everyone knows what attention is’ according to William James. Much work on attention in psychology and neuroscience cites this famous phrase only to quickly dismiss it. But James is right about this: ‘attention’ was not introduced into psychology and neuroscience as a theoretical concept. I argue that we should therefore study attention with broadly the same methodology that David Marr has applied to the study of perception. By focusing more on Marr's Computational Level of analysis, we arrive at a unified (...)
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  3. Paying attention to attention: psychological realism and the attention economy.Dylan J. White - 2024 - Synthese 203 (2):1-22.
    In recent years, philosophers have identified a number of moral and psychological harms associated with the attention economy (Alysworth & Castro, 2021; Castro & Pham, 2020; Williams, 2018). Missing from many of these accounts of the attention economy, however, is what exactly attention is. As a result of this neglect of the cognitive science of attention, many of these accounts are not empirically credible. They rely on oversimplified and unsophisticated accounts of not only attention, but self- control, and addiction as (...)
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  4. The Epistemology of Attention.Catharine Saint-Croix - forthcoming - In Kurt Sylvan, Jonathan Dancy, Matthias Steup & Ernest Sosa (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition. Wiley Blackwell.
    Root, branch, and blossom, attention is intertwined with epistemology. It is essential to our capacity to learn and decisive of the evidence we obtain, it influences the intellectual connections we forge and those we remember, and it is the cognitive tool whereby we enact decisions about inquiry. Moreover, because it is both an epistemic practice and a site of agency, attention is a natural locus for questions about epistemic morality. This article surveys the emerging epistemology of attention, reviewing the existing (...)
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  5. Augmented Intelligence - The New AI - Unleashing Human Capabilities in Knowledge Work.James M. Corrigan - 2012 - 2012 34Th International Conference on Software Engineering (Icse 2012).
    In this paper I describe a novel application of contemplative techniques to software engineering with the goal of augmenting the intellectual capabilities of knowledge workers within the field in four areas: flexibility, attention, creativity, and trust. The augmentation of software engineers’ intellectual capabilities is proposed as a third complement to the traditional focus of methodologies on the process and environmental factors of the software development endeavor. I argue that these capabilities have been shown to be open to improvement through the (...)
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  6. The Role of Information in Consciousness.Harry Haroutioun Haladjian - forthcoming - Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice.
    This article comprehensively examines how information processing relates to attention and consciousness. We argue that no current theoretical framework investigating consciousness has a satisfactory and holistic account of their informational relationship. Our key theoretical contribution is showing how the dissociation between consciousness and attention must be understood in informational terms in order to make the debate scientifically sound. No current theories clarify the difference between attention and consciousness in terms of information. We conclude with two proposals to advance the debate. (...)
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  7. Review of Jonardon Ganeri: Attention Not Self[REVIEW]Christopher Mole - 2018 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (1):194-207.
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  8. (Un)conscious Perspectival Shape and Attention Guidance in Visual Search: A reply to Morales, Bax, and Firestone (2020).Benjamin Henke & Assaf Weksler - forthcoming - In Juraj Hvorecký, Tomáš Marvan & Michal Polák (eds.), Conscious and Unconscious Mentality: Examining their Nature, Similarities and Differences. Routledge.
    When viewing a circular coin rotated in depth, it fills an elliptical region of the distal scene. For some, this appears to generate a two-fold experience, in which one sees the coin as simultaneously circular (in light of its 3D shape) and elliptical (in light of its 2D ‘perspectival shape’ or ‘p-shape’). An energetic philosophical debate asks whether the latter p-shapes are genuinely presented in perceptual experience (as ‘perspectivalists’ argue) or if, instead, this appearance is somehow derived or inferred from (...)
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  9. Seeing Circles: Inattentive Response-Coupling.Denis Buehler - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9.
    What is attention? On one influential position, attention constitutively is the selection of some stimulus for coupling with a response. Wayne Wu has proposed a master argument for this position that relies on the claim that cognitive science commits to an empirical sufficient condition (ESC), according to which, if a subject S perceptually selects (or response-couples) X to guide performance of some experimental task T, she therein attends to X. In this paper I show that this claim about cognitive science (...)
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  10. Dynamic Attentional Mechanisms of Creative Cognition.Shadab Tabatabaeian & Carolyn Jennings - 2023 - Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 4.
    In popular imagination creativity requires us to surrender control. Yet, attention is at the heart of control, and many studies show attention to play a key role in the creative process. This is partly due to the selective nature of attention—creative cognition consists of two phases, idea generation and idea evaluation, and selective processes are essential for both phases. Here, we investigate attentional (i.e., selective) mechanisms underlying each phase, using the framework of two major attention taxonomies: top-down/bottom-up and internal/external attention. (...)
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  11. Curiosity and Zetetic Style in ADHD.Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen & Somogy Varga - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
    While research on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has traditionally focused on cognitive and behavioral deficits, there is increasing interest in exploring possible resources associated with the disorder. In this paper, we argue that the attention-patterns associated with ADHD can be understood as expressing an alternative style of inquiry, or “zetetic” style, characterized mainly by a lower barrier for becoming curious and engaging in inquiry, and a weaker disposition to regulate curiosity in response to the cognitive and practical costs associated (...)
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  12. In search of boredom: beyond a functional account.James Danckert & Andreas Elpidorou - 2023 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 27 (5):494-507.
    Boredom has been characterized as a crisis of meaning, a failure of attention, and a call to action. Yet as a self-regulatory signal writ-large, we are still left with the question of what makes any given boredom episode meaningless, disengaging, or a prompt to act. We propose that boredom is an affective signal that we have deviated from an optimal (‘Goldilocks’) zone of cognitive engagement. Such deviations may be due to a perceived lack of meaning, arise as a consequence of (...)
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  13. Imagination, Endogenous Attention, and Mental Agency.Tom Cochrane - 2023 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1:1-21.
    This paper develops a mechanistic account of basic mental agency by identifying similarities between two of its major exemplars: endogenous attention and imagination. Five key similarities are identified: i) that both capacities are driven by currently prioritised goals that are either person-level or apt to become person-level. ii) that both deliver their outputs to the working memory iii) that both range across all and only conceptual contents; iv) that both proceed under the guidance of norms and/or habits; and v) that (...)
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  14. Unfitting Absent Emotion.James Fritz - 2023 - In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics Volume 18. Oxford University Press. pp. 73-96.
    The world provides us with an ocean of opportunities for fitting emotion. But we are beings with limited emotional resources, so missed opportunities are common. This chapter argues that these failures to take up fitting emotions are very frequently unfitting in their own right—so frequently, in fact, that most of us lead lives replete with unfitting absences of emotion. It begins by showing that, whenever an emotion can be unfitting in virtue of being too weak, the absence of that emotion (...)
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  15. Moving and Looking.Jacob Stump - 2022 - American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy 6:74-79.
    There is a way of teaching philosophy as a way of life that is focused on delivering content. In this paper, I consider a different way. It is focused on giving students the experience of philosophy as a way of life—in particular, the experience of being in love with wisdom. The main question of my paper is what it might be to teach philosophy in a way that prioritizes giving students the chance to fall in love with wisdom. I do (...)
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  16. Learning in the Open Air.Amanda Corris - 2022 - Public Philosophy Journal 4.
    The typical college lecture hall is a highly artificial environment: windowless, fluorescent-lit, and technology-heavy. It all but necessitates treating students as mental receptacles, where learning is a matter of passive absorption of knowledge, and where it is increasingly difficult to hold students’ attention. Natural environments, such as forests and public parks, provide a striking comparison—they free us from technological distractions, invigorate our senses, and encourage physical in addition to mental exploration. What’s more, research in environmental psychology suggests that natural environments (...)
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  17. Concept of Attention in Bergson’s and Husserl’s Philosoph.Mark Losoncz - 2020 - Filozofska Istrazivanja 40 (4):829-839.
    The paper comparatively deals with the concept of attention in Bergson’s and Husserl’s philosophy. Special attention is devoted to their confrontation with psychological interpretations, as well as to methodological aspects of their theories. Analysed are the vitality, intentionality and temporality of attention by keeping in mind the complex terminological background in both Bergson and Husserl. The author holds that what connects them is that they both define attention as an inherent dynamic modification, with the different dimensions of presence, past and (...)
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  18. Stupefying.Michael Deigan - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22 (1).
    Assertions are often accepted without being understood, a phenomenon I call stupefying. I argue that stupefying can be a means for conversational manipulation that works through at-issue content, in contrast with the not-at-issue and back-door speech act routes identified by others. This shows that we should reject a widely assumed connection between attention and at-issue content. In exploring why stupefying happens, it also emerges that stupefying has important cooperative uses, in addition to its manipulative ones, and so should not be (...)
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  19. Explicating Agency: The Case of Visual Attention.Denis Buehler - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (2):379-413.
    How do individuals guide their activities towards some goal? Harry Frankfurt once identified the task of explaining guidance as the central problem in action theory. An explanation has proved to be elusive, however. In this paper, I show how we can marshal empirical research to make explanatory progress. I contend that human agents have a primitive capacity to guide visual attention, and that this capacity is actually constituted by a sub-individual psychological control-system: the executive system. I thus illustrate how we (...)
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  20. The Philosophy and Psychology of Ambivalence: Being of Two Minds.Berit Brogaard & Dimitria Electra Gatzia (eds.) - 2020 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    This book collects original essays by top scholars that address questions about the nature, origins, and effects of ambivalence. While the nature of agency has received an enormous amount of attention, relatively little has been written about ambivalence or how it relates to topics such as agency, rationality, justification, knowledge, autonomy, self-governance, well-being, social cognition, and various other topics. Ambivalence presents unique questions related to many major philosophical debates. For example, it relates to debates about virtues, rationality, and decision-making, agency (...)
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Attention and Consciousness
  1. Template Tuning and Graded Consciousness.Berit Brogaard & Thomas Alrik Sørensen - 2023 - In Juraj Hvorecký, Tomáš Marvan & Michal Polák (eds.), Conscious and Unconscious Mentality: Examining their Nature, Similarities, and Differences. London: Routledge. pp. 251–273.
    Whether visual perceptual consciousness is gradable or dichotomous has been the subject of fierce debate in recent years. If perceptual consciousness is gradable, perceivers may have less than full access to—and thus be less than fully phenomenally aware of—perceptual information that is represented in working memory. This raises the question: In virtue of what can a subject be less than fully perceptually conscious? In this chapter, we provide an answer to this question, according to which inexact categorizations of visual input (...)
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  2. Proactive control and agency.René Baston - 2024 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 23 (1):43-61.
    Can agents overcome unconscious psychological influences without being aware of them? Some philosophers and psychologists assume that agents need to be aware of psychological influences to successfully control behavior. The aim of this text is to argue that when agents engage in a proactive control strategy, they can successfully shield their behavior from some unconscious influences. If agents actively check for conflicts between their actions and mental states, they engage in reactive control. For engaging in reactive control, agents need awareness (...)
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  3. The Puzzle of Wandering Inquiry.Susanna Siegel - manuscript
    Inquiry is guided, in the minimal sense that it is not haphazard. It is also often thought to have as a natural stopping point ceasing to inquire, once inquiry into a question yields knowledge of an answer. On this picture, inquiry is both telic and guided. By contrast, mind-wandering is unguided and atelic, according to the most extensively developed philosophical theory of it. This paper articulates a puzzle that arises from this combination of claims: there seem to be plenty of (...)
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  4. The transparency of mental vehicles.Michael Murez - 2023 - Noûs:1-28.
    Modes of presentation (MOPs) are often said to have to be transparent, usually in the sense that thinkers can know solely via introspection whether or not they are deploying the same one. While there has been much discussion of threats to transparency stemming from externalism, another threat to transparency has gar- nered less attention. This novel threat arises if MOPs are robust, as I argue they should be according to internalist views of MOPs which identify them with represen- tational vehicles, (...)
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  5. Growing Evidence for Separate Neural Mechanisms for Attention and Consciousness.Alexander Maier & Naotsugu Tsuchiya - 2021 - Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics 83:558-576.
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  6. Biological Naturalism and the Mind-Body Problem.Jane Anderson - 2022 - Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
    This book offers a new theoretical framework within which to understand “the mind-body problem”. The crux of this problem is phenomenal experience, which Thomas Nagel famously described as “what it is like” to be a certain living creature. David Chalmers refers to the problem of “what-it-is-like” as “the hard problem” of consciousness and claims that this problem is so “hard” that investigators have either just ignored the issue completely, investigated a similar (but distinct) problem, or claimed that there is literally (...)
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  7. Consciousness, Attention, and the Motivation-Affect System.Tom Cochrane - 2023 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (7):139-163.
    It is an important feature of creatures like us that our various motivations compete for control over our behaviour, including mental behaviour such as imagining and attending. In large part, this competition is adjudicated by the stimulation of affect — the intrinsically pleasant or unpleasant aspects of experience. In this paper I argue that the motivation-affect system controls a sub-type of attention called 'alerting attention' to bring various goals and stimuli to consciousness and thereby prioritize those contents for action. This (...)
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  8. Notas sobre o conceito de atenção em Descartes.Lia Levy - 2017 - Modernos E Contemporâneos 1 (2):46-56.
    O artigo busca evidenciar as vantagens exegéticas de um estudo mais amplo sobre o conceito de atenção na filosofia de Descartes e avançar preliminarmente algumas hipóteses sobre seu sentido e função. Mais precisamente, sugere-se uma aproximação dos conceitos de atenção e tempo, de modo que a primeira se definiria - não como uma experiência subjetiva incomunicável, ou como uma qualidade dessa experiência-, mas em relação ao conceito cartesiano de duração, tanto em sua conexão com a mente humana quanto independentemente dessa (...)
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  9. Provoking thought: A predictive processing account of critical thinking and the effects of education.Christopher J. May, Ryan Wittingslow & Merethe Blandhol - 2022 - Educational Philosophy and Theory 54 (14):2458-2468.
    In this paper, we propose that an increasingly regarded theoretical framework in neuroscience—the predictive processing framework—can help to advance an understanding of the foundations of critical thinking as well as provide a mechanistic hypothesis for how education may increase a learner’s subsequent use of critical thinking outside of an educational context. We begin by identifying a lacuna in the understanding of critical thinking: a causal account of the internal triggers to think critically. We then introduce the predictive processing framework to (...)
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  10. Attention and perceptual justification.Nicholas Silins & Susanna Siegel - 2019 - In Adam Pautz & Daniel Stoljar (eds.), Blockheads! Essays on Ned Block’s Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  11. Mindmelding, Chapter 11: Disentangling self and consciousness.William Hirstein - 2012 - In Mindmelding: Consciousness, Neuroscience, and the Mind's Privacy. Oxford University Press.
    This chapter shows that mindmelding is metaphysically possible, i.e., that it does not violate any laws governing the metaphysical nature of reality. Metaphysical issues are fundamental and lie at the core of the most difficult parts of the problems of privacy and the mind-body problem itself. There is nothing stopping us from placing the idea of mindmelding on clear, unproblematic, and plausible metaphysical foundations. It is argued that the position of privacy is the one on shaky metaphysical grounds. Two metaphysical (...)
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  12. Emotion and Attention.Jonathan Mitchell - 2022 - Philosophical Studies (1):1-27.
    This paper first demonstrates that recognition of the diversity of ways that emotional responses modulate ongoing attention generates what I call the puzzle of emotional attention, which turns on recognising that distinct emotions (e.g., fear, happiness, disgust, admiration etc.) have different attentional profiles. The puzzle concerns why this is the case, such that a solution consists in explaining why distinct emotions have the distinct attentional profiles they do. It then provides an account of the functional roles of different emotions, as (...)
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  13. The why of the phenomenal aspect of consciousness: Its main functions and the mechanisms underpinning it.Giorgio Marchetti - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 913309 (13):1-20.
    What distinguishes conscious information processing from other kinds of information processing is its phenomenal aspect (PAC), the-what-it-is-like for an agent to experience something. The PAC supplies the agent with a sense of self, and informs the agent on how its self is affected by the agent’s own operations. The PAC originates from the activity that attention performs to detect the state of what I define “the self” (S). S is centered and develops on a hierarchy of innate and acquired values, (...)
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  14. Psychedelic Expansion of Consciousness: A Phenomenological Study in Terms of Attention.Jason K. Day & Susanne Schmetkamp - 2022 - InCircolo 13:111-135.
    Induced by intake of the psychedelic substances LSD, psilocybin, DMT and mescaline, psychedelic experiences have been extensively described by subjects as entailing a most unusual increase in the scope and quality of their consciousness. Accordingly, psychedelic experiences have been widely characterised as an “expansion of consciousness.” This article poses the following question, as yet unaddressed in contemporary philosophy and the tradition of phenomenology: to what exactly does “expansion of consciousness” refer as a general characterisation of psychedelic experiences, and what role (...)
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  15. The Phenomenal Contribution of Attention.Jonathan Mitchell - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Strong or Pure Intentionalism is the view that the phenomenal character of a conscious experience is exhaustively determined by its intentional content. Contrastingly, impure intentionalism holds that there are also non content-based aspects or features which contribute to phenomenal character. Conscious attention is one such feature: arguably its contribution to the phenomenal character of a given conscious experience are not exhaustively captured in terms of what that experience represents, that is in terms of properties of its intentional object. This paper (...)
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  16. Dal corpo oggetto alla mente incarnata - From the object body to the embodied mind.Francesca Brencio - 2021 - InCircolo – Rivista di Filosofia E Culture 11.
    F. Brencio (2021) [in Italian and English] (ed.), Dal corpo oggetto alla mente incarnata - From the object body to the embodied mind, in “InCircolo – Rivista di Filosofia e Culture”, 11, ISSN 2531-4092.
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  17. Attention and Perception.Ronald A. Rensink - 2015 - In R. A. Scott, S. M. Kosslyn & M. C. Buchmann (eds.), Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Interdisicplinary, Searchable, and Linkable Resource. Wiley. pp. 1-14.
    This article discusses several key issues concerning the study of attention and its relation to visual perception, with an emphasis on behavioral and experiential aspects. It begins with an overview of several classical works carried out in the latter half of the 20th century, such as the development of early filter and spotlight models of attention. This is followed by a survey of subsequent research that extended or modified these results in significant ways. It covers current work on various forms (...)
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  18. Perception and Attention.Ronald A. Rensink - 2013 - In Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Psychology. pp. 97-116.
    Our visual experience of the world is one of diverse objects and events, each with particular colors, shapes, and motions. This experience is so coherent, so immediate, and so effortless that it seems to result from a single system that lets us experience everything in our field of view. But however appealing, this belief is mistaken: there are severe limits on what can be visually experienced. -/- For example, in a display for air-traffic control it is important to track all (...)
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  19. Salience: A Philosophical Inquiry.Sophie Archer (ed.) - 2022 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    What is salience? This collection addresses this neglected question by considering the role of salience in a wide variety of areas. All 13 chapters are specially commissioned, and written by an international team of contributors.
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  20. The Many Faces of Attention: why precision optimization is not attention.Madeleine Ransom & Sina Fazelpour - 2020 - In Dina Mendonça, Manuel Curado & Steven S. Gouveia (eds.), The Philosophy and Science of Predictive Processing. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 119-139.
    The predictive coding (PC) theory of attention identifies attention with the optimization of the precision weighting of prediction error. Here we provide some challenges for this identification. On the one hand, the precision weighting of prediction error is too broad a phenomenon to be identified with attention because such weighting plays a central role in multimodal integration. Cases of crossmodal illusions such as the rubber hand illusion and the McGurk effect involve the differential precision weighting of prediction error, yet attention (...)
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  21. Does Loudness Represent Sound Intensity? (Preprint).Kim Soland - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-27.
    In this paper I challenge the widely held assumption that loudness is the perceptual correlate of sound intensity. Drawing on psychological and neuroscientific evidence, I argue that loudness is best understood not as a representation of any feature of a sound wave, but rather as a reflection of the salience of a sound wave representation; loudness is determined by how much attention a sound receives. Loudness is what I call a quantitative character, a species of phenomenal character that is determined (...)
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  22. An Agent of Attention: An Inquiry into the Source of Our Control.Aaron Henry - 2019 - Dissertation, University of Toronto
    When performing a skilled action—whether something impressive like a double somersault or something mundane like reaching for a glass of water—you exercise control over your bodily movements. Specifically, you guide their course. In what does that control consist? In this dissertation, I argue that it consists in attending to what you are doing. More specifically, in attending, agents harness their perceptual and perceptuomotor states directly and practically in service of their goals and, in doing so, settle the fine-grained manner in (...)
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  23. How Judgments of Visual Resemblance are Induced by Visual Experience.Alon Chasid & Alik Pelman - 2021 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 28 (11-12):54-76.
    Judgments of visual resemblance (‘A looks like B’), unlike other judgments of resemblance, are often induced directly by visual experience. What is the nature of this experience? We argue that the visual experience that prompts a subject looking at A to judge that A looks like B is a visual experience of B. After elucidating this thesis, we defend it, using the ‘phenomenal contrast’ method. Comparing our account to competing accounts, we show that the phenomenal contrast between a visual experience (...)
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  24. Attention, Not Self, by Jonardon Ganeri. [REVIEW]Sebastian Watzl - 2018 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
    In this review of Ganeri's book I focus specifically on the metaphysical issues about attention raised by it. On the one hand, there is a distinction between essence and constitutive explanation. On the other hand, there is a puzzle how a phenomenon like attention could (as it appears to be on Ganeri's position) be both explanatorily central and also disunified ('not a single psychological kind', as Ganeri puts it). I discuss several possible solutions to this puzzle.
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  25. Quantitative Character and the Composite Account of Phenomenal Content.Kim Soland - 2022 - Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
    I advance an account of quantitative character, a species of phenomenal character that presents as an intensity (cf. a quality) and includes experience dimensions such as loudness, pain intensity, and visual pop-out. I employ psychological and neuroscientific evidence to demonstrate that quantitative characters are best explained by attentional processing, and hence that they do not represent external qualities. Nonetheless, the proposed account of quantitative character is conceived as a compliment to the reductive intentionalist strategy toward qualitative states; I argue that (...)
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  26. Attentional Structuring, Subjectivity, and the Ubiquity of Reflexive Inner Awareness.Amit Chaturvedi - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Some have argued that a subject has an inner awareness of its conscious mental states by virtue of the non-introspective, reflexive awareness that any conscious state has of itself. But, what exactly is it like to have a ubiquitous and reflexive inner awareness of one’s conscious states, as distinct from one’s outer awareness of the apparent world? This essay derives a model of ubiquitous inner awareness (UIA) from Sebastian Watzl’s recent theory of attention as the activity of structuring consciousness into (...)
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  27. Relative priming of temporal local-global levels in auditory hierarchical stimuli.Alexandra List & Timothy Justus - 2010 - Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics 72 (1):193–208.
    Priming is a useful tool for ascertaining the circumstances under which previous experiences influence behavior. Previously, using hierarchical stimuli, we demonstrated (Justus & List, 2005) that selectively attending to one temporal scale of an auditory stimulus improved subsequent attention to a repeated (vs. changed) temporal scale; that is, we demonstrated intertrial auditory temporal level priming. Here, we have extended those results to address whether level priming relied on absolute or relative temporal information. Both relative and absolute temporal information are important (...)
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  28. Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness are Empirically False.N. Greely - 2020 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 27 (11-12):30-54.
    Higher-order theories of consciousness come in many varieties, but all adopt the 'transitivity principle' as a central, explanatory premise. The transitivity principle states that a mental state of a subject is conscious if and only if the subject is aware of it. This higher-order awareness is realized in different ways in different forms of higher-order theory. I argue that empirical studies of metacognition have falsified the transitivity principle by showing that there can be awareness of a mental state without that (...)
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  29. Bodily feelings and psychological defence. A specification of Gendlin’s concept of felt sense.Jan Puc - 2020 - Ceskoslovenska Psychologie 64 (2):129-142.
    The paper aims to define the concept of “felt sense”, introduced in psychology and psychotherapy by E. T. Gendlin, in order to clarify its relation to bodily sensations and its difference from emotions. Gendlin’s own definition, according to which the felt sense is a conceptually vague bodily feeling with implicit meaning, is too general for this task. Gendlin’s definition is specified by pointing out, first, the different layers of awareness of bodily feelings and, second, the difference between bodily readiness for (...)
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  30. Too much attention, too little self. [REVIEW]Carolyn Dicey Jennings - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (2):475-480.
    This is a good time for such a substantial book on Buddhaghosa. His ideas may be more difficult to digest than those of contemporary authors, but Ganeri convincingly argues for their relevance. Together with Ganeri’s considerable interpretive and philosophical work, Buddhaghosa’s view helps to fill out a perspective that is popular in cognitive science, in which the self is replaced by systems. In this case, the self is replaced by systems of attention, a view that Ganeri calls ‘Attentionalism.’ In this (...)
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