# What Attention Is. The Priority Structure Account ![rw-book-cover](https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/media/uploaded_book_covers/profile_1188016/68WT4QisuBSQrPhAXuzglBXFTe_3pDZGi0oJn6qCmtg-cove_MKqiox7.png) ## Metadata - Author: [[Sebastian Watzl]] - Full Title: What Attention Is. The Priority Structure Account - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: The text discusses the concept of attention in psychology and neuroscience, proposing a methodology for studying attention at Marr's Computational Level. It introduces the "priority structure account" of attention, highlighting its role in organizing information for the organism. The article emphasizes the importance of studying attention in an interdisciplinary context. - URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/152181443 - Source File: What attention is. The priority structure account by Sebastian Watzl.pdf ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > What attention is. The priority structure account Sebastian Watzl ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs15fd510a9en6d89hx833ta)) > I argue that we should study attention with broadly the same methodology that has proven successful for the study of perception ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs36q3bg5s8g2kx309zax44a)) > Work on Marr's level 1 can be central to scientific progress: the view of the mind as computational device is itself a > level 1 discovery, Chomsky's transformational grammar revolutionized linguistics, and vision science is so successful in part because it has largely converged on vision's role as a specific representational device that delivers an organism- or subject-level objective representation of a set of basic features in the organism's immediate environment (e.g., Burge, 2010; Marr, 1982). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs36t21p62h4z1tac7pg8wkw)) > I suggest that the best answer to the identity question, first, should capture core aspects of our pre-theoretic or manifest image of attention; second, it should describe a phenomenon that can do explanatory work within psychology and neuroscience and that is plausibly measured by the science of attention (knowledge of how attention works on level 2 + 3 thus acts as one constraint on a level 1 theory of attention); third, it should be fertile in an interdisciplinary context, and help connecting work on attention from neuroscience and psychology with the models of mind and behavior used in other fields like evolutionary biology, economics, decision and game theory, ethics, political theory, and law. The best answer to the identity question regarding attention is one that optimizes in this three-dimensional space. This, I believe, is what ‘getting it right’ about what attention is amounts to. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs36ycx1ep4w6t79g9b52hg5)) - Note: Nice way of specifying the work of philosophy of mind and perception > This feature captures what selection-for-action (Allport, 1987; Neumann, 1987; Wu, 2014) and conscious highlighting (Watzl, 2011) have in common: they are forms of prioritization by and for the whole organism. In this way, we can understand what a core component of scientific work on attention shares with the first-person experience of it. Because it involves usability, attention is closely tied to working memory (though not identical to it, Fougnie, 2009). In part because attentional organization is tied to the whole person, an agent's priority structures can be assessed along epistemic, ethical, and political dimensions (e.g., Murdoch, 1970 [2013], Fairweather and Montemayor (2017), Smith & Archer, 2020, Munton, 2021, Siegel 2022, Whiteley, 2022, Watzl, 2022a). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs37jmayqn5cnefvcg0545hh)) > Prioritizing among currently activated states provides an organism with behavioral flexibility ‘on the fly’ without changes to their standing preferences, and while keeping the content of its perceptual representations fixed. This is especially important in fast-changing circumstances that require quick situational adaptation. The relevant behavioral decoupling, arguably, is a core driving factor for the evolution of minds. Since attention is > the simplest way of making perceptual contents usable for action, it is essential for the integration and unification that makes unified subjects and minds evolutionarily possible. More complex form of behavioral decoupling that involve the formation of standing commitments in the forms of, for example, intentions or beliefs, are more sophisticated cognitive achievements. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs37rry69ewfdn9cc7m24efk)) > Watzl, S. (2018). Is attention a non-propositional attitude? In M. Montague & A. Grzankowski (Eds.), Non-propositional intentionality. Oxford University Press. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hs3786gzn7v9pnw17wpfqjvk)) - Tags: [[toread]]