okay, a short nerdy thread that nobody asked for: why I think that attention ≠ selection

note: this relates primarily to perceptual attention, because that's my field of research

1. selectivity occurs throughout the perceptual process. For one selectivity occurs prior to attention. Competition between stimuli in the visual field can guide attention towards a stimulus. That means that attention already relies on selectivity.

2. when we say attention = selection we usually conflate attention with the probable outcomes of attention (e.g., fast responses, accuracy, awareness, etc). The outcomes can likely emerge w/o attention. Attention does not necessarily leads to these outcomes.

Both (1) and (2) can result in a lot of dangerous circularities.

How did we find the target? Because we attended to it. How do we know we attended to it? Because we found it.

3. Other processes are also selective. Saying that attention = selection conflates attention with other selective process. For example, expected stimuli are more likely to be encoded because they match a pre-activated representation. Should we say, "that's also attention"?

4. not all types of attention results in “selection” as we think about it. When we focus our attention on a stream of stimuli (RSVP), we don’t select each and every stimulus. Nevertheless, the focus of attention does modulate these stimuli relative to stimuli outside this focus.

5. attention can result in the selection of other objects. Attending to a target in an RSVP can very often result in reporting the next item over instead (or seeing multiple item). Why? Because attention is smeared over time, it does not select specific objects.

6. saying that attention = selection means that there’s a point in time where we can say that processes go from being pre-attentive to attentive, but that implicit assumption is very problematic (and I wrote an entire paper which is hard to summarize: link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-021-02023-7).

Finally, I think that all of these problems are resolved if we say simply say that attention = (limited) modulation of processing. This modulation obviously results in further selectivity. But, this is not tantamount to that attention = selection.

Does any of this convince anyone? 😅