Analysis suggests attention is a psychological concept, highlighting mechanistic explanations for attentional phenomena.
Rosenholtz describes “attention theory” as a scientific paradigm in crisis, in the Kuhnian sense. But is attention a theory? Here, I question this premise. Although there can be theories of attentional phenomena, attention is not a theory. Rather, like memory and emotion, attention is a psychological concept that captures a broad class of phenomena, requiring multiple mechanistic explanations.
No takes yet. Share an insight, caveat, or question.
Rachel N. Denison (2025) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: