What is attention? Adverbialist theories.

This article presents theories of attention that attempt to derive their answer to the question of what attention is from their answers to the question of what it is for some activity to be done attentively. Such theories provide a distinctive account of the difficulties that are faced by the attempt to locate processes in the brain by which the phenomena of attention can be explained. Their account does not share the pessimism of theories suggesting that the concept of attention is defective. Instead it reconstrues the explanatory relationship between attention and the processes that constitute it, in a way that is illustrated here by considering the relationship between attention and the processes that are identified by the biased competition theory. After considering some of the ways in which an adverbialist approach might be developed, the article concludes by suggesting some possible solutions to a problem concerning distraction, by which prominent adverbialist theories of attention have been dogged. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Attention Philosophy > Metaphysics Philosophy > Foundations of Cognitive Science.

The Role of Attention in Multisensory Integration.

Evidence concerning the relationship between attention and multisensory integration has long been thought to lead us into a paradox. The paradox has its roots in evidence that seems to show that attention exerts an influence on integration, and that integration also exerts an influence on attention. This creates an appearance of paradox only if it is understood to imply that particular instances of the integration process must occur both before and after particular instances of the attention process. But this appearance of paradox can be removed if we can find a way to resist the idea that there must be fixed temporal relations between the instances of these processes. That idea can seem hard to resist if both are understood to be processes of the sort that are brought to a halt by their own completion. Reflection on a metaphysical distinction between different sorts of process shows this understanding can be rejected. The appearance of paradox is thereby removed.

Are there Special Mechanisms of Involuntary Memory?

Following the precedent set by Dorthe Berntsen's 2009 book, Involuntary Autobiographical Memory, this paper asks whether the mechanisms responsible for involuntarily recollected memories are distinct from those that are responsible for voluntarily recollected ones. Berntsen conjectures that these mechanisms are largely the same. Recent work has been thought to show that this is mistaken, but the argument from the recent results to the rejection of Berntsen's position is problematic, partly because it depends on a philosophically contentious view of voluntariness. Berntsen herself shares this contentious view, but the defenders of her position can easily give it up. This paper explains how and why they should.

Attention in the predictive mind.

It has recently become popular to suggest that cognition can be explained as a process of Bayesian prediction error minimization. Some advocates of this view propose that attention should be understood as the optimization of expected precisions in the prediction-error signal (Clark, 2013, 2016; Feldman & Friston, 2010; Hohwy, 2012, 2013). This proposal successfully accounts for several attention-related phenomena. We claim that it cannot account for all of them, since there are certain forms of voluntary attention that it cannot accommodate. We therefore suggest that, although the theory of Bayesian prediction error minimization introduces some powerful tools for the explanation of mental phenomena, its advocates have been wrong to claim that Bayesian prediction error minimization is 'all the brain ever does'.

Dead Reckoning in the Desert Ant: A Defence of Connectionist Models.

Dead reckoning is a feature of the navigation behaviour shown by several creatures, including the desert ant. Recent work by C. Randy Gallistel shows that some connectionist models of dead reckoning face important challenges. These challenges are thought to arise from essential features of the connectionist approach, and have therefore been taken to show that connectionist models are unable to explain even the most primitive of psychological phenomena. I show that Gallistel's challenges are successfully met by one recent connectionist model, proposed by Ulysses Bernardet, Sergi Bermúdez i Badia, and Paul F.M.J. Verschure. The success of this model suggests that there are ways to implement dead reckoning with neural circuits that fall within the bounds of what many people regard as neurobiologically plausible, and so that the wholesale dismissal of the connectionist modelling project remains premature.