The DOI matches its Crossref record; 155 of the 155 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
No one knows what attention is
Open accessAbstract
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.
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Cites
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Evolution of behavioural control from chordates to primates
Cisek, P. (2022) · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B · doi:10.1098/rstb.2020.0522 · Cited by 107
Self-citationDisability and Discourses of Web Accessibility
Adam, A., & Kreps, D. (2009) · Information, Communication & Society · doi:10.1080/13691180802552940 · Cited by 88
Tasks and their role in visual neuroscience
Kay, K., Bonnen, K., Denison, R. N., Arcaro, M. J., & Barack, D. L. (2023) · Neuron · doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2023.03.022 · Cited by 61
The Multifaceted Nature of Bilingualism and Attention
Chung-Fat-Yim, A., Calvo, N., & Grundy, J. G. (2022) · Frontiers in Psychology · doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.910382 · Cited by 22
Metadata
- Authors
- Hommel, B., Chapman, C. S., Cisek, P., Neyedli, H. F., Song, J.-H., & Welsh, T. N.
- Venue
- Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics
- Published
- 2019-09-05
- Volume
- 81
- Issue
- 7
- Pages
- 2288-2303
- ISSN
- 1943-3921 (ISSN-L)
- 1943-393X
- OpenAlex
- W2971464184
- Cited by
- 594
- References
- 155
- FWCI
- 19.87
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
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- Hommel, B., Chapman, C. S., Cisek, P., Neyedli, H. F., Song, J.-H., & Welsh, T. N. (2019). No one knows what attention is. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-019-01846-w
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
