Attention Unified

For over a century, scientists have expressed deep misgivings about attention. A layperson would find this puzzling, for they know what attention is as well as those with sight know what seeing is. People visually attend all the time. Attention is real, we know what it is, and we can explain it. I shall argue that the problem of attention concerns the conceptual and logical structure of the scientific theory of attention. Because of shared methodology, we are committed to a single functional conception of attention, what William James articulated long ago. I show how this shared conception provides a principle of unification that links empirical work. To illustrate this, I show how two cueing paradigms tied to “external” and “internal” attention, spatial cueing and retro-cueing, are instances of the same kind of attention. Against common skepticism, I demonstrate that we are all committed to the existence of attention as a target of explanation. Yet in step with the skeptic, I show that attention is not an explainer in the sense that it is not a neural mechanism. Locating attention at the right level of analysis in cognitive explanation is key to understanding what it is and how science has made massive progress in understanding it.