No one knows what attention is
No one knows what attention is
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DOI：
10.3758/s13414-019-01846-w
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发表时间：
2019-10-01
影响因子：
1.7
通讯作者：
Welsh, Timothy N.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Hommel, Bernhard;Chapman, Craig S.;Welsh, Timothy N.
在这篇文章中，我们挑战了“注意力”作为一个单一结构和/或神经系统的有用性。我们指出，这个概念有太多的含义，不足以证明一个术语的合理性，而“注意力”一词既指解释性（需要解释的一组现象），也指解释性（进行解释的一组过程）。为了说明这些观点，我们集中讨论视觉选择性注意。本文认为，加工过程中的选择性是作为复杂的多通道感觉运动系统的设计特征在进化过程中出现的，它产生了选择性的“注意”现象，这是许多副产品之一。与传统的注意力分析方法不同，我们提出了一种综合方法，该方法从理解良好的机制开始，不需要专注于注意力，但可以解释正在研究的选择性现象。我们得出的结论是，最有利于科学进步的是放弃将“注意力”作为特定功能或神经系统的标签，转而关注与行为相关的选择过程和执行它们的许多系统。
In this article, we challenge the usefulness of "attention" as a unitary construct and/or neural system. We point out that the concept has too many meanings to justify a single term, and that "attention" is used to refer to both the explanandum (the set of phenomena in need of explanation) and the explanans (the set of processes doing the explaining). To illustrate these points, we focus our discussion on visual selective attention. It is argued that selectivity in processing has emerged through evolution as a design feature of a complex multi-channel sensorimotor system, which generates selective phenomena of "attention" as one of many by-products. Instead of the traditional analytic approach to attention, we suggest a synthetic approach that starts with well-understood mechanisms that do not need to be dedicated to attention, and yet account for the selectivity phenomena under investigation. We conclude that what would serve scientific progress best would be to drop the term "attention" as a label for a specific functional or neural system and instead focus on behaviorally relevant selection processes and the many systems that implement them.