Analysis highlights the crisis of underspecified mechanisms of attention, suggesting a need to clarify its role in explanations.
While I agree with Rosenholtz that attention as mechanism should often be “banned”—this conception is confused and often explanatorily useless—I suggest that the real crisis is the proliferation of different, too often underspecified, mechanisms as attention. Attention is not an explainer. It is what we are trying to explain. Confusion on this point leads to unnecessary theoretical disunity.
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Wayne Wu (2025) studied this question.
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