What attention is. The priority structure account.

IF 3.2 2区 心理学 Q1 PSYCHOLOGY, EXPERIMENTAL Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews-Cognitive Science Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI:10.1002/wcs.1632
Sebastian Watzl
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引用次数: 1

Abstract

'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 answer to the question of what attention is, what role it plays in the mind, and why organisms like us have that capacity. I propose a methodology for studying attention at Marr's Computational Level that optimizes in a three-dimensional space: it should capture core aspects of our first-person experience of attention, be explanatorily powerful in psychology and neuroscience, and fertile in an interdisciplinary context. I show how this methodology leads to what I call the priority structure account of attention. Attention is what organizes current information to make it more useful for the organism. We can identify it by four features. Attention, in this way, helps a cognitive system to integrate its informational state with its current motivational state. I describe how this account improves on alternatives and shows why attention is a useful concept in many disciplines and for connecting them. This article is categorized under: Philosophy > Psychological Capacities Psychology > Attention Philosophy > Foundations of Cognitive Science.

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注意力是什么?优先级结构帐户。
威廉·詹姆斯说:“每个人都知道注意力是什么。”心理学和神经科学中许多关于注意力的研究都引用了这句名言,但很快就把它忽略了。但詹姆斯说得对:“注意力”并不是作为一个理论概念引入心理学和神经科学的。因此,我认为我们应该用David Marr应用于感知研究的大致相同的方法来研究注意力。通过更多地关注Marr的计算水平分析,我们对注意力是什么,它在大脑中扮演什么角色,以及为什么像我们这样的生物体具有这种能力等问题得出了统一的答案。我提出了一种在三维空间中优化的马尔计算水平(Marr’s Computational Level)研究注意力的方法:它应该捕捉到我们第一人称注意力体验的核心方面,在心理学和神经科学中具有强大的解释性,在跨学科背景下具有丰富的内容。我展示了这种方法是如何导致我所谓的注意力优先结构解释的。注意力是组织当前信息使其对机体更有用的东西。我们可以通过四个特征来识别它。通过这种方式,注意帮助认知系统整合其信息状态和当前动机状态。我描述了这种解释是如何改进替代方法的,并说明了为什么注意力在许多学科中都是一个有用的概念,并且可以将它们联系起来。本文分类为:哲学>心理能力心理学>注意哲学>认知科学基础。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
7.30
自引率
7.70%
发文量
50
期刊最新文献
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