What we notice and what we make

Branches of thought on attention, thanks to Stevens' Handbook of Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Volume 2, Sensation, Perception, and Attention, 4th Edition.

From the first time you’re yelled at to “pay attention!” to the hugely-boosting moment you notice that sometimes your brain is just “mathier” than other times, and certain things are easier to comprehend and create in certain states of mind in comparison to others—surely you, surely I, have found handles on this incredibly meta concept that all teachers beg of us for the duration of their class time.

Attention. What is it? Why does it differ, and what exactly does this do to my “states of mind”? Why am I occasionally math-blind, or complexity-blind? Every time I notice the limits of my attention, I want a better grip on, at the very least, my comprehension of the mechanism, in order to better strategise around it.

So, here are some questions:

1. What is attention?

2. What is it for/what does it do? — Adaptive behaviour mechanisms

3. Doesn’t this implicate our study of…everything? Importance of perception to understanding…everything? (conjecture territory here, but go for it)

4. So what about ADHD? — ADHD detour

5. Who will notice what I don’t notice, for me? — Conditioning and diversity

6. About what we tell ourselves to notice… — Exploratory approach random thought

Disclaimer: some of sections 1 and 2 will probably feel like pedantic explainers for rather obvious things. The pedantic mechanism (I think) matters, though, for sections 3-6.

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I — What is attention?

The blessing of reading textbooks instead of hundreds of papers is that they do the distilling and compilation of information for you. Here’s a bare-bones definition proposed by the Stevens' Handbook of Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Volume 2, Sensation, Perception, and Attention, 4th Edition:

…the prioritization of processing information that is relevant to current task goals. This minimal definition still respects the property of attention as a process, and captures its essential selection aspect of prioritizing relevant over irrelevant information. The corollary of this definition is that the effects of attention can be measured as the differential processing of the same item as a function of its relevance. Attention confers benefits in behavioral performance and neural processing when effectively deployed toward the relevant item, when compared to a neutral, baseline state. When deployed away from an item, costs in behavioral performance and neural processing may be observed.

Page 245

II — What is it for/what does it do?

Additionally, the very definition of the process or mechanism implies some sort of purpose or goal: there needs to be some sense of “current task goal(s)” in order to sort through what is and isn’t relevant to them, even if we’re often unconscious of what we’ve implicitly determined the task goals to be (at least, as far as performance-based tasks go, see section VI for more).

Both external and internal factors influence what we determine is relevant and therefore more important to notice (what we’ll notice more, where our attention goes).

External factors are necessarily involuntary: certain stimuli are simply more salient¹, and therefore will be noticed more and, once noticed, will cue an individual to pay more attention towards it. For example, “all other things being equal, we are more likely to perceive something bright or transient or fast or loud than something dim or permanent or slow or quiet.”² In another angle of looking at it, salient stimuli “trigger a prioritization process that favors items that may be relevant for guiding adaptive behavior, due to their evolutionary value”. But interestingly, though we might be this responsive to emotional and social stimuli due to evolutionary processes, we might also additionally be particularly responsive due to the relevance these stimuli have acquired in our memories of experiences — and these are internal factors!

Internal factors can be both voluntary and involuntary (I tell myself I particularly care about locating x information, and therefore pay more attention to it; or perhaps I have been badly hurt in the past by a hot item, and therefore now instinctively take notice of any particularly hot items within reach). These cues are definitively “in my head”, and they do direct where my attention goes.

But the effect doesn’t merely stop there: tasks need to be completed, goals reached.

The commonality between both external and internal factors is that they eventually lead to adaptive behaviour, due to the direction they have cast an individual’s attention towards. Given that you paid more attention to specific things, you noticed certain things more, and therefore did not perceive other things. This affected the resulting action, which would’ve given you further information based on whatever changed following your action, which then triggers yet another flood of information for you to be selectively noticing and responding to.

Attention is not merely what we notice and what we don’t, but a mechanism that guides what we think and feel and do. Your attention is as unique and protean as you are moment to moment. It touches everything, and if you don’t notice the impact of its limits, it touches even more.

III — Doesn’t this implicate our study of…everything?

As far as I can see, this functions as a great explainer, or theoretical foundation, for…basically everything. Assuming that we more or less function and do things through internal decision-making, and that these decisions are typically not random, but probabilistic or at the very least somewhat reasoned, then surely understanding the perception of different states of mind would be key to understanding, predicting, and even influencing or manipulating the behaviours that result from those states of mind.

For example, if I’m depressed, and negatively-valenced information is far more salient to me than positive information³, this reinforces my internal narrative that no one likes me around and I should just stay home and not even try at anything at all, which makes the depression worse. This cascade of perception-to-biased-narrative-to-behaviour makes way more sense, and is way easier to parse through and therefore work with, than blinding operating off of mere observation of the resulting patterns alone (which often, in psychology, are so muddled with the complexities of each person and situation’s context anyway).

But how do we study perception? As far as I can tell, psychology’s still trying to figure this out, but making steps in the direction of real methodology for it⁴.

I plan to read further to explore this eventually, particularly for methods like eye tracking and measurable behavioural tracking (like posture and gait?) that I’m completely unfamiliar with. The instinct for the importance of phenomenology and subjective experience is understandably a bit sketchy as far as careful science goes, but surely we can figure out what science looks like in streams requiring understanding and knowledge of these subjective things. I want to figure out what this looks like.

Regarding individual difference:

IV — So how does that work for ADHD?

ADHD—that is, a disorder of attentional deficit—also results in being easily overwhelmed, a lack of impulse control, and forgetfulness. On the surface, these have very little association with attention. So, how is attention implicated in this?

There are several functions/mechanisms implicated in the process of attention, including inhibition of irrelevant thought and executive function to even determine what the current goal or task is, as the reference point for discriminating relevance. Given that ADHD is associated with impairments of “the neural systems regulating executive control, [and] inhibition”⁵, it makes sense as to how the processing and doing of everything becomes way harder. In particular, if an individual struggles with setting a specific goal internally, (or, potentially, if an individual is constantly set to “learning” mode, rather than “performance” mode, and therefore is letting in a lot of “irrelevant” information as well?), and further struggles with generally inhibiting stimuli that is “irrelevant” to the task at hand, this poor individual is going to find performance-based attention twice as hard as the hypothetical neurotypical counterfactual.

The weirder or “worse” your attention gets, the more unpredictable or scattered your adapted behaviour becomes (and presumably, the more scattered your cognition becomes as well).

V — Who will notice what I don’t notice, for me?

ADHD or not, attention is clearly limited by nature (we would, in fact, be way less capable of performing anything at all without its limits), and incredibly specific to each context, both because of external cues and internal bias-cues, such as long-term memories (both conscious and unconscious).

The example that launched this branch of the attention rabbit-hole was the many differing, often disparate disciplines in psychology. Biological, cognitive, behaviourist, narrativist, social and anthropological and evolutionary — they’re often so different we might as well hold them as different paradigms. Different assumptions in each approach—which feasibly arise from differing attention frames and therefore different sets of calibrated stimuli perceived—bring about different points and value systems, which rocket off their own sub-fields of study, all more or less related under the banner of “human behaviour and cognition”, but often talking past one another.

It would be great if we could actually unite the approaches of psychology. I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking this. For the relatively short time in which it’s existed, the discipline has been wanting for a paradigm that properly works for structuring its infinitesimally complex and utterly self-evidently important subject matter, so much to the point that some people I’ve talked to despair of ever getting to such a mythical scaffold. I figure all disciplines, when they were emerging, had similar woes, though. We never know quite how possible something is until we do it.

Behaviourism, and then cognitive psychology, both attempted to be fairly strong paradigms for the study; except they were fairly reductionist (modern cognitive being less so). Nonetheless, I’m not satisfied. It seems intuitive to me, given that each approach brings about valid and important (even actionable) points about the human experience or behaviour; that any proper paradigm that manages to unite the field will be complex, rather than reductionist. We need ways of formalizing and interfacing the different kinds of information acquired from these studies in order to really bring about this body of knowledge concerning the human will and how it’s exerted. Surely this is possible. And surely this is important.

Just because we don’t know it yet, and don’t really (to my knowledge, which is admittedly very very limited) does not mean we can never know it. And it certainly does not mean we should give up on the discipline just yet.

Perhaps we are overly used to the comfort of knowing the paradigms and methodology of each science and discipline, reveling in the centuries of solid(ish) knowledge that’s accumulated. But isn’t it a gift, to be humbled in the face of a pre-paradigmatic field, still in the process of setting into a temporarily solid shape that can be built upon?

This has turned into an apology for my love and belief in the field, despite the strange thoughts and findings after some preliminary studies into it. I do not really mind.

Experimental studies that require participants to carry out two different tasks in succession have revealed that goal-related information uploaded to perform one task will influence performance in another task, sometimes causing significant interference (Soto & Humphreys, 2014)…

From page 253 of Steven’s Handbook

Bar (2004) showed that the interpretation of an ambiguous stimulus depends on learned contextual associations. The same fuzzy black object is recognized as a hair dryer on a bathroom unit and as a drill on a workshop table.

(Page 254)

To break out of our cognitively-limited frames of attention; to build more nuanced views and understand the single-sidedness and incompletion, yet partial truth of each perceived reality, we need the humbling gift of being made aware of those limitations by someone that sees another side of it, thanks to their conditioning. And then, in a perfect world, we reciprocate that gift through interfacing with them in a similar way, too.

I don't even mean this in dramatic, clear differences in demographic, though I'm sure that's important too. In fact, on the other end of the scale, I claim that the hair-splitting difference between something like a cognitive narratologist and a narrative psychologist matters.

Given that the nature of attention requires us to both hold on one specific frame of attention at once, and knowing that conditioning has effects we’re often unaware of and can’t easily break out of solely through our own slanted cognition—as simply and commonly as I can put it, a lifetime of education matters, and generally each education is unique.

While in this example⁶, both deal with the realm of human mental scape and narratives, and the connections between the two, a cognitive narratologist presumably belongs first and foremost to the study of stories, of narratives—they’ve been educated by the patterns and methodology and knowledge bases of narratology. A narrative psychologist, however, comes from the education of psychology, and therefore presumably has a focus on the psychology first and foremost, which might concretely look something like being concerned with the utility of the principles garnered from narrative theory, or care more about the ways narratives play out in therapy, rather than a more detached, theoretical, witnessing-esque focus in cognitive narratology.

Perhaps the more hair-splitting, the more important it is to how we build the knowledge base of psychology. It's in the slightest slants of differences where a perspective shift is hardest to notice and break out of. It seems intuitive to me that there exists potential challenges to assumptions made and inferences drawn that only emerge through sufficient differences in conditioning and attention; and therefore we need diversity in conditioning, in education and perspective and therefore thought and decision—in adaptive behaviour.

VI — About what we tell ourselves to notice…

There are different kinds of goals, in particular “learning” goals and “performance” goals. Learning goals stress uncertainty, since “when learning about the regularities of a new environment, it is what you don’t know that becomes important.”⁷ Thus anything I’ve predicted perfectly becomes less important, or even irrelevant. Consider learning the layout of a new supermarket: if the produce is exactly where I’d expect it to be, I’d simply move on to noticing that the cereals section is much further than my prediction, because the new stuff is what needs rewriting in my mind—it’s more important in this scenario.

By contrast, a performance task, such as locating a particular brand of cereal in the supermarket I visit every week, values certainty. “When high levels of performance are required, prior knowledge is essential and predictions about upcoming stimuli can facilitate performance.”⁸ To find a particular brand of cereal, I’m focused on a specific aisle, a specific shelf, a particular set of colours and shapes that signal the right brand I’ve intended to buy.

It’s notable that while real-life situations usually mix these two modes, experiments often focus on testing the latter, since it’s presumably easier to measure and score. A lot of what we know about attention thus relates to performance-based attention, and might not apply perfectly to learning and exploration-based attention.

Most research focuses on performance-based attention as opposed to learning/exploration-based attention. With what I currently know, this seems…not very good.

Given what we know about attention, which is effectively biased-noticing with a goal in mind that eventually conditions future attention-frames—surely the habit of only studying performance-based attention, and that knowledge/evidence conditioning us towards seeing certain kinds of cognitive patterns, is a questionable thing?

What if we’re being conditioned into thinking more or less entirely in the dimension of performance, and therefore neglecting the dimension of cognition that focuses far more on uncertainty and new information, less articulable goals and more pure processing of the new?

Surely there should be more research into more exploratory forms of attention, if only to make up for this gap, and potential for bias?

Again, this is a very new exploratory thought I plan to read further into, and as always, appreciate critique and engagement on, whether publicly or privately.

Sign Sculpture, porcelain tile sculpture by Victor Vasarely, 1977; outside Pauline Church in Pécs, Hungary.

1. Noticeable, or prominent.

2. Page 251

3. Given brain cells “fire more” at stimuli that trigger negative feelings/interpretations, and other given brain cells “fire less” at stimuli that trigger positive feelings/interpretations. Conceptualise the eventual narrative as being a product of the competing bits of information (with their bias weighted by what your attentional framework is determining to be more or less salient).

4. See Q-methodology, mixed-methods e.g. self report with other things, that which gpt for some reason seems to term “cognitive neuroscience of subjectivity”, but really refers to the use of brain imaging and physiological measures to study the correlates with internal phenomena.

5. Page 287

6. Does this particular example seem incredibly specific and random? A friend of mine has recently fallen into the rabbit hole of narratology (the study of narratives), and from that, found the particular niche of cognitive narratology. I’ve been talking to her about narrative psychology and noting the potential differences, after hearing about an essay that argued the nonexistence or illegitimacy of cognitive narratology to begin with.

7. Page 251

8. Again, page 251