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Attention
Edited by Sebastian Watzl (University of Oslo)
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 et al 2011, Watzl 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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Related
Subcategories
The Nature of Attention (159)
Joint Attention (183)
Salience (218)
Attention and Action (115)
Attention, Misc (202)
See also
- Mental Actions (328)
- Perception (17,944 | 1,802)
- Science of Perception (2,112 | 691)
Contents
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Material to categorize
- The Attention Economy and The Right to Attention: Some Lessons from Theravāda and Mahāyāna Thought.Mark Fortney - 2025 - Journal of Buddhist Ethics 32.Much of the work in the rapidly growing field of computer ethics relies on the concepts and theories of Western philosophy. With this article my aim is to help stimulate conversations that draw on a wider range of ethical perspectives. I build on recent work on the sense in which the regular operations of the attention economy might violate our right to attention, and I do so through looking to a range of Theravāda and Mahāyāna Buddhist texts. As I argue, (...)
- Curiosity and zetetic style in ADHD.Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen & Somogy Varga - 2025 - Philosophical Psychology 38 (2):897-921.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 (...)
- The Role of Long-Term Memory in Visual Perception.Berit Brogaard & Thomas Alrik Sørensen - 2024 - In Robert French & Berit Brogaard, The Roles of Representations in Visual Perception. Springer. pp. 47–69.There has been a long-standing debate in philosophy and psychology about the role of representation in visual perception. Here, we argue on the basis of evidence from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience that episodic and schematic memory representations are pivotal to the visual perception of objects and scenes. In the visual perception of objects and scenes, sensory information is initially matched with object and scene templates, or schemas, in long-term memory. The most relevant representations are then selected for encoding in working (...)
- Visual attention and representational content.Kim Soland - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.Attention makes a phenomenal difference to visual experience, but the nature of this difference is controversial. There are three possibilities. The first is that the phenomenology of visual attention has deflationary content, which is to say that attention makes a phenomenal difference only by modulating the appearance of an attended object's visible features. Secondly, it has novel content—attention contributes unique representational content to visual experience. Thirdly, it has no content—the phenomenal contribution of attention to visual experience is not representational at (...)
- Communicating Understanding.Adham El Shazly - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.Knowledge can be transmitted through testimony. What about understanding? In this paper I argue against the possibility of testimonial understanding by giving an account of understanding in terms of ‘mental structures’. Then I argue while we cannot integrate communicating understanding into a propositional model of epistemic communication, we can do so on a perspectival model. I highlight the importance of this to the epistemology of education throughout.
- Attention and Practical Knowledge.Hao Tang - 2023 - Journal of Human Cognition 7 (2):19-29.Practical knowledge, in the sense made famous by G. E. M. Anscombe, is “the knowledge that a man has of his intentional actions”. This knowledge is very ordinary, but philosophically it is not easy to understand. One illuminating approach is to see practical knowledge as a kind of self-knowledge or self-consciousness. I offer an enrichment of this approach, by (1) exploiting Gilbert Ryle’s discussion of heeding (that is, paying attention), in particular paying attention to one’s own intentional action, and (2) (...)
- Automated Influence and Value Collapse.Dylan J. White - 2024 - American Philosophical Quarterly 61 (4):369-386.Automated influence is one of the most pervasive applications of artificial intelligence in our day-to-day lives, yet a thoroughgoing account of its associated individual and societal harms is lacking. By far the most widespread, compelling, and intuitive account of the harms associated with automated influence follows what I call the control argument. This argument suggests that users are persuaded, manipulated, and influenced by automated influence in a way that they have little or no control over. Based on evidence about the (...)
- Event completion: a test case for theories of reference in memory.Michael Murez & Brent Strickland - 2024 - Synthese 204 (78):1-33.Although we encounter objects from a particular perspective, what we perceive and remember are typically whole objects. In ‘amodal completion’ our mind automatically fills in objects’ spatially occluded parts, and our memory then often discards information about the orientation from which the objects were perceived. An analogous phenomenon of ‘event completion’ has been demonstrated, which may be understood as the mind automatically filling in temporally occluded parts of events. Exemplifying typical experiments in this paradigm, Strickland and Keil (Strickland and Keil, (...)
- The Strategic Allocation Theory of Vigilance.Samuel Murray & Santiago Amaya - forthcoming - WIREs Cognitive Science.Despite its importance in different occupational and everyday contexts, vigilance, typically defined as the capacity to sustain attention over time, is remarkably limited. What explains these limits? Two theories have been proposed. The Overload Theory states that being vigilant consumes limited information-processing resources; when depleted, task performance degrades. The Underload Theory states that motivation to perform vigilance tasks declines over time, thereby prompting attentional shifts and hindering performance. We highlight some conceptual and empirical problems for both theories and propose an (...)
- Automated Influence and Value Collapse: Resisting the Control Argument.Dylan J. White - forthcoming - American Philosophical Quarterly.Automated influence is one of the most pervasive applications of artificial intelligence in our day-to-day lives, yet a thoroughgoing account of its associated individual and societal harms is lacking. By far the most widespread, compelling, and intuitive account of the harms associated with automated influence follows what I call the control argument. This argument suggests that users are persuaded, manipulated, and influenced by automated influence in a way that they have little or no control over. Based on evidence about the (...)
- The Profile of Imagining.Robert Hopkins - 2024 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.What is sensory imagining and what role does it play in our lives? How does visualizing a castle, running through a tune in one's head, or imagining the taste of fish ice cream relate to perceiving such things, or to remembering them? What are the connections between imagining and agency, and how does it relate to emotion and other affect? The Profile of Imagining offers a theory that answers these and many other questions. It argues that sensory imagining involves the (...)
- The Philosophical Landscape on Attention.Carolyn Dicey Jennings - 2020 - In The Attending Mind. New York: Cambridge University Press.Attention has a long history in philosophy, despite its near absence in the twentieth century. This chapter provides an overview of philosophical research on attention. It begins by explaining the concept of "selection from limitation," contrasting it with the more recent "selection for action." It reviews historical texts that discuss attention, focusing on those in the Western canon whose understanding of "attention" aligns with contemporary usage. It then describes the differential treatment of attention in phenomenology and behaviorism in the last (...)
- Attention.Carolyn Dicey Jennings - 2021 - In Benjamin D. Young & Carolyn Dicey Jennings, Mind, Cognition, and Neuroscience: A Philosophical Introduction. Routledge.The main questions in philosophical research on attention concern its nature and impact. Regarding its nature, one might ask what sort of thing attention is; regarding its impact, one might ask what sort of thing attention does. While these questions have been asked by philosophers for thousands of years, they have had a resurgence in recent years due to advancements in the cognitive and neural sciences. This chapter will cover some historical context as prelude to a discussion of the contemporary (...)
- Is the wandering mind a planning mind?Frederik Tollerup Junker & Thor Grünbaum - 2024 - Mind and Language 39 (5):706–725.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 (...)
- 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 (...)
- The Epistemology of Attention.Catharine Saint-Croix - forthcoming - In Kurt Sylvan, Ernest Sosa, Jonathan Dancy & Matthias Steup, 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 (...)
- 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. (...)
- Review of Jonardon Ganeri: Attention Not Self. [REVIEW]Christopher Mole - 2018 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (1):194-207.Remove from this listExport citation
Bookmark - (1 other version)Loving Attention: Buddhaghosa, Katsuki Sekida, and Iris Murdoch on Meditation and Moral Development.Mark Fortney - forthcoming - Philosophy East and West.According to Iris Murdoch, one of our central moral capacities is the capacity to direct our attention in a way that is just and loving. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch explores the prospects for strengthening this capacity through engaging in Zen Buddhist practices, particularly zazen meditation as Katsuki Sekida describes it in Zen Training: Methods and Philosophy. Murdoch has a mixed view of whether zazen could really contribute to our moral development, expressing both some optimism and some (...)
- (Un)conscious Perspectival Shape and Attention Guidance in Visual Search: A reply to Morales, Bax, and Firestone (2020).Benjamin Henke & Assaf Weksler - 2023 - In Michal Polák, Tomáš Marvan & Juraj Hvorecký, Conscious and Unconscious Mentality: Examining Their Nature, Similarities and Differences. New York, NY: 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 (...)
- (1 other version)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 (...)
- 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. (...)
- 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 (...)
- 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 (...)
- Unfitting Absent Emotion.James Fritz - 2023 - In Russ Shafer-Landau, 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 (...)
- 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 (...)
- 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 (...)
- 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 (...)
- 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 (...)
- 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 (...)
- The Philosophy and Psychology of Ambivalence: Being of Two Minds.Berit Brogaard & Dimitria Electra Gatzia (eds.) - 2020 - New York: Routledge.This volume provides novel approaches to a variety of questions about ambivalence and the role it plays in our lives. As the contributions illustrate, ambivalence finds its way into a gamut of philosophical and psychological debates about rationality, skepticism, emotions, intentionality, racism, global justice, well-being, mindfulness, and intersubjectivity. These debates concern questions like: “Is ambivalence distinct from uncertainty?”, “Does ambivalence affect the way we respond to paradoxes?”, “How can two nations come to an agreement about nuclear disarmament?”, “Is ambivalence irrational (...)
- Intentional action processing results from automatic bottom-up attention: An EEG-investigation into the Social Relevance Hypothesis using hypnosis.Eleonore Neufeld, Elliot C. Brown, Sie-In Lee-Grimm, Albert Newen & Martin Brüne - 2016 - Consciousness and Cognition 42:101-112.Social stimuli grab our attention: we attend to them in an automatic and bottom-up manner, and ascribe them a higher degree of saliency compared to non-social stimuli. However, it has rarely been investigated how variations in attention affect the processing of social stimuli, although the answer could help us uncover details of social cognition processes such as action understanding. In the present study, we examined how changes to bottom-up attention affects neural EEG-responses associated with intentional action processing. We induced an (...)
- Notes and supplementary dissertations.William Hamilton - 1895 - In Works of Thomas Reid (8th Ed.). James Thin.
Attention and Consciousness
- The Normativity of Introspective Acquaintance Knowledge.Jacopo Pallagrosi - forthcoming - Synthese.Recent works in epistemology have defended the existence of acquaintance knowledge - a non-propositional form of knowledge constituted by the subject's acquaintance with particulars. A significant obstacle to the epistemic legitimacy of acquaintance knowledge lies in the fact that acquaintance is a descriptive psychological phenomenon, whereas knowledge is a normative one. In this paper, I aim to address this challenge by arguing that introspective acquaintance knowledge - the subject's knowledge of their own experiences constituted by acquaintance with them - exhibits (...)
- Trialistic panqualityism.Tal Hendel - manuscriptPanqualityism is a form of panpsychism that distinguishes between conscious subjects (i.e., minds) and phenomenal qualities. Like panpsychism, it holds that the universe's physical ultimates are phenomenally qualitied. Unlike panpsychism, however, it argues that these phenomenally qualitied ultimates are not microsubjects and are therefore not experienced. By rejecting the idea that phenomenally qualitied ultimates are microsubjects, panqualityism escapes the subject combination problem. However, this creates a new challenge: explaining how conscious macrosubjects arise from non-experiential microqualities. Here I address this challenge (...)
- Inner awareness: the argument from attention.Anna Giustina & Uriah Kriegel - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (9):2451–2475.We present a new argument in favor of the Awareness Principle, the principle that one is always aware of one’s concurrent conscious states. Informally, the argument is this: (1) Your conscious states are such that you can attend to them without undertaking any action _beyond mere shift of attention_; but (2) You cannot come to attend to something without undertaking any action beyond mere shift of attention unless you are already aware of that thing; so, (3) Your conscious states are (...)
- Degrees of Attention and Degrees of Consciousness.Azenet L. Lopez - 2023 - In Michal Polák, Tomáš Marvan & Juraj Hvorecký, Conscious and Unconscious Mentality: Examining Their Nature, Similarities and Differences. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 229-250.A standing question in consciousness science is whether consciousness arises gradually or in a sudden way. This empirical question is connected to a metaphysical one, concerning the kind of property that consciousness is, i.e., graded or categorical. Recently, Lee (2022) suggested that settling this question requires deciding which theory of consciousness is true. Applying an insight from Wiese (2020), this chapter pursues a way of approximating answers by examining properties that are necessary for consciousness, which consciousness must have regardless of (...)
- Perceptual Links: Attention, Experience, and Demonstrative Thought.Michael Barkasi - 2015 - Dissertation, Rice UniversityPerception is conscious: perceiving involves a first-person experience of what’s perceived. It’s widely held that these perceptual experiences are independent of what's perceived. Viewing two visually indiscriminable #2 pencils would involve the same experience, despite viewing different objects. It’s also widely held that conscious perception enables thinking about what's perceiving. When you see one of those pencils you can think, THAT is a pencil. Some philosophers, including John McDowell and John Campbell, have suggested that these two features engender a puzzle: (...)Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Seeing Without Discriminating.Ayoob Shahmoradi - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.What does the most fundamental type of perceptual (or mental) reference look like? One view suggests that perceptual reference requires representation-as, while another holds that it requires discriminating the perceived item. I distinguish five types of discrimination, three of which are personal-level and distinctively visual, and explain their implications and interrelations. Next, I argue that the plausibility of the claim that perceiving something requires discriminating it—rather than simply attributing properties to it—depends on the type of discrimination at issue. A weak (...)
- Template Tuning and Graded Consciousness.Berit Brogaard & Thomas Alrik Sørensen - 2023 - In Michal Polák, Tomáš Marvan & Juraj Hvorecký, Conscious and Unconscious Mentality: Examining Their Nature, Similarities and Differences. New York, NY: 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 (...)
- 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 (...)
- Wandering Inquiry.Susanna Siegel - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.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 (...)
- (1 other version)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, (...)
- Growing Evidence for Separate Neural Mechanisms for Attention and Consciousness.Alexander Maier & Naotsugu Tsuchiya - 2021 - Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics 83:558-576.
- 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 (...)
- 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 (...)
- 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 (...)
- 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 (...)
- In praise of poise.Daniel Stoljar - 2018 - In Adam Pautz & Daniel Stoljar, Blockheads! Essays on Ned Block’s Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness. new york: MIT Press.
- Attention and perceptual justification.Nicholas Silins & Susanna Siegel - 2018 - In Adam Pautz & Daniel Stoljar, Blockheads! Essays on Ned Block’s Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness. new york: MIT Press.
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