Behavioral and Brain Sciences最新文献

How do our goals continually impact perceptual processing? The answer could arise from a computational specification of perception in terms of visual tasks, or perhaps several mechanisms operating over specific contexts. Here, we suggest an alternative: adaptive computation, a new algorithmic account of attention that rations the general resource of perceptual computations according to their impact on decision making.

Rosenholtz describes "attention theory" as a scientific paradigm in crisis, in the Kuhnian sense. But is attention a theory? Here, I question this premise. Although there can be theories of attentional phenomena, attention is not a theory. Rather, like memory and emotion, attention is a psychological concept that captures a broad class of phenomena, requiring multiple mechanistic explanations.

Rosenholtz addresses the crisis of proliferating mechanisms for visual attention by redefining the concept in terms of (a) the known limitations of peripheral vision and (b) a proper assessment of task complexity. We argue that abandoning the see → decide → act pipeline model and the myth of a centralized gate or resource eliminates this crisis. In our view, "attention" describes an outcome-the consequence of multiple constraints on perception and action-rather than a reified cause.

Attention has been used to explain performance deficits in many visual tasks, even though it lacks a clear definition or distinction from visual perception. We agree with Dr. Rosenholtz that perceptual processes may account for many phenomena previously attributed to spatial attention. We further suggest that perceptual processes may underlie the study of temporal attention, namely the "attentional blink."

Why have some organisms evolved processes of attention as distinct from perception in general? Investigation of freely behaving organisms (not in laboratory tasks) suggests that attention as distinct from perception is critical for goal-directed organisms' value-based decision making. As such, the target of attention is not punctate stimuli, but whole situations (scenes) that are relevant to that decision.

Rosenholtz proposes to replace the concept of attention with peripheral vision models, such as the Texture Tiling Model (TTM). Here, we show that the TTM fails in many psychophysical studies due to its local, single-stage, feedforward, and low-level processing. Given that both attention and peripheral vision are unsettled fields, we argue that replacing one with the other is unwarranted.

Rosenholtz's framework reconciles contradictory findings in ensemble perception by attributing perceptual failures to task complexity and peripheral summary-statistic limitations rather than attentional lapses. This perspective also reframes the attentional blink (AB) as a manifestation of temporal crowding rather than a failure of selective attention. Philosophically, this challenges the idea that attention is constitutive of action, suggesting instead that task constraints shape both perception and agency.

Rosenholtz's paper is a solid addition to a long tradition of throwing out babies with attentional bathwater (Di Lollo, ) (Wolfe, ) (Hulleman & Olivers, ) (Wolfe, ). She is correct that the term "attention" has been used in profligate and often ill-defined ways. That said, I argue that any plausible model of visual search must include visual selective attention.

Rosenholtz argues that summary statistics explain attentional phenomena via peripheral vision. While we acknowledge their role, we challenge the claim that they serve as an alternative mechanism. Instead, we argue that summary statistics and selective attention are interdependent, shaping visual perception under limited capacity, as evidenced by perceptual biases in numerosity judgments and mean estimations of shape size, color, and position.

The review argues that researchers can and should disregard the examination of eye movement behavior when seeking to understand the role that peripheral vision plays in various tasks. We present specific examples to argue that eye movement behavior has and will continue to aid in confirming and disconfirming hypotheses regarding visual-cognitive information processing in a variety of tasks.