Abstract
This chapter investigates the relationship between attention and joint attention by focusing on one seemingly plausible way of characterizing the central role of attention. On this view, basic cases of perceptual attention are fundamentally a matter of selecting one item and filtering out unattended items. Drawing on contributions from philosophy of mind and classical phenomenology, I propose that joint attention research can benefit from adopting a richer and more nuanced view of attention. On this second view, conscious perceptual attention is not a matter of selecting and filtering out, but rather of re-organizing and re-articulating the experiential field into a foreground-background structure. I consider three benefits of the second view: (i) a more context-sensitive approach to the question of how to account for the transition from solitary to joint attention; (ii) a potentially fruitful examination of that transition in terms of thematic modifications; and (iii) a better appreciation of the co-constructed aspect of joint attentional interactions.
