Attention: Idol of the Tribe

The term ’attention’ has been a drag on our science ever since the early days of experimental psychology. Our frequent offerings and sacrifices (articles and the debates they provoke), and our unwillingness to abandon our belief in this reified entity indicates the aptness of the Jamesian phrase ”idol of the tribe.” While causal accounts of attention are empty, attention might be, as suggested by Hebb, a useful label. It could be used to indicate that some experimental observable is not immediately explained by the excitation of receptor cells. However, labeling of something as ’attention’ means there is something to be explained; not that something has been explained. Common experimental manipulations used to provoke visual selective attention: instructions, cues, and reward are in fact the guide to explaining away ’attention’. The observations provoked by such manipulations frequently induce behavioral performance differences not explainable in terms of differences in retinal stimulation. These manipulations are economically summarized as components of a process in which base rates, evidence, value, and plausibility combine to determine perceptual experience. After briefly reviewing the history of how attention has been confusing from the start, I will summarize the notion of conceptual fragmentation and show how it applies. I will then review how the traditional conditions of an attentional experiment provide the basis for a superior, attention free, account of the phenomena of interest, and I will present some of the opportunities for the use of more formal descriptions that should lead to better theoretically motivated experimental investigations.