Attention in Crisis

Recent research on peripheral vision has led to a paradigm-shifting conclusion: that vision science as a field must rethink the concept of visual attention. Research has uncovered significant anomalies not explained by existing theories, and some methods for studying attention may instead have uncovered mechanisms of peripheral vision. Nor can a summary statistic representation in peripheral vision solve these problems on its own. A year of banning “attention” in my lab allowed us to rethink attention from the ground up; this talk will conclude with some of the resulting insights.