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      No one knows what attention is

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          Abstract

          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.

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          The Cambrian conundrum: early divergence and later ecological success in the early history of animals.

          Diverse bilaterian clades emerged apparently within a few million years during the early Cambrian, and various environmental, developmental, and ecological causes have been proposed to explain this abrupt appearance. A compilation of the patterns of fossil and molecular diversification, comparative developmental data, and information on ecological feeding strategies indicate that the major animal clades diverged many tens of millions of years before their first appearance in the fossil record, demonstrating a macroevolutionary lag between the establishment of their developmental toolkits during the Cryogenian [(850 to 635 million years ago (Ma)], and the later ecological success of metazoans during the Ediacaran (635 to 541 Ma) and Cambrian (541 to 488 Ma) periods. We argue that this diversification involved new forms of developmental regulation, as well as innovations in networks of ecological interaction within the context of permissive environmental circumstances.
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            Saccade target selection and object recognition: evidence for a common attentional mechanism.

            The spatial interaction of visual attention and saccadic eye movements was investigated in a dual-task paradigm that required a target-directed saccade in combination with a letter discrimination task. Subjects had to saccade to locations within horizontal letter strings left and right of a central fixation cross. The performance in discriminating between the symbols "E" and "E", presented tachistoscopically before the saccade within the surrounding distractors was taken as a measure of visual attention. The data show that visual discrimination is best when discrimination stimulus and saccade target refer to the same object; discrimination at neighboring items is close to chance level. Also, it is not possible, in spite of prior knowledge of discrimination target position, to direct attention to the discrimination target while saccading to a spatially close saccade target. The data strongly argue for an obligatory and selective coupling of saccade programming and visual attention to one common target object. The results favor a model in which a single attentional mechanism selects objects for perceptual processing and recognition, and also provides the information necessary for motor action.
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              Probabilistic decision making by slow reverberation in cortical circuits.

              Recent physiological studies of alert primates have revealed cortical neural correlates of key steps in a perceptual decision-making process. To elucidate synaptic mechanisms of decision making, I investigated a biophysically realistic cortical network model for a visual discrimination experiment. In the model, slow recurrent excitation and feedback inhibition produce attractor dynamics that amplify the difference between conflicting inputs and generates a binary choice. The model is shown to account for salient characteristics of the observed decision-correlated neural activity, as well as the animal's psychometric function and reaction times. These results suggest that recurrent excitation mediated by NMDA receptors provides a candidate cellular mechanism for the slow time integration of sensory stimuli and the formation of categorical choices in a decision-making neocortical network.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                +1 (416) 946-3303 , t.welsh@utoronto.ca
                Journal
                Atten Percept Psychophys
                Atten Percept Psychophys
                Attention, Perception & Psychophysics
                Springer US (New York )
                1943-3921
                1943-393X
                5 September 2019
                5 September 2019
                2019
                : 81
                : 7
                : 2288-2303
                Affiliations
                [1 ]GRID grid.5132.5, ISNI 0000 0001 2312 1970, Institute of Psychology, Cognitive Psychology Unit and Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, , Leiden University, ; Leiden, the Netherlands
                [2 ]GRID grid.17089.37, Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation, , University of Alberta, ; Edmonton, Alberta Canada
                [3 ]GRID grid.14848.31, ISNI 0000 0001 2292 3357, Department of Neuroscience, , University of Montreal, ; Montreal, Quebec Canada
                [4 ]GRID grid.55602.34, ISNI 0000 0004 1936 8200, School of Health and Human Performance, , Dalhousie University, ; Halifax, Nova Scotia Canada
                [5 ]GRID grid.40263.33, ISNI 0000 0004 1936 9094, Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences, , Brown University, ; Providence, RI USA
                [6 ]GRID grid.17063.33, ISNI 0000 0001 2157 2938, Centre for Motor Control, Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education, , University of Toronto, ; 55 Harbord Street, Toronto, ON M5S 2W6 Canada
                Article
                1846
                10.3758/s13414-019-01846-w
                6848248
                31489566
                152c2065-257f-4683-afff-547f838a1643
                © The Author(s) 2019

                Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

                History
                Categories
                Time for Action: Reaching for a Better Understanding of the Dynamics of Cognition
                Custom metadata
                © The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2019

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                attention,motor control,selection,sensorimotor,decision making,phylogenetic,intention,evolution,parietal cortex,superior colliculus

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