Toward a Metafunctional Theory of Attention: Recursive Triadic Architecture, Attentional Metabinding, and Attentional Worldhood

This preprint develops the Metafunctional Theory of Attention (MTA), a neurophenomenological account of attention within the Brain Metafunction Framework (BMF). The MTA conceptualizes attention as a recursive organism-level process through which nonconscious, preconscious, and conscious processes organize significance across neurobiological, embodied, behavioral, interpersonal, and phenomenological dimensions of organism–world engagement. It proposes a triadic architecture comprising Afferent Attentional Differentiation (AAD), Metafunctional Attentional Integration (MAI), and Efferent Attentional Enactment (EAE). Within this architecture, attentional metabinding is the core recursive integrative operation, principally associated with MAI, through which distributed significance structures are organized into dynamic hierarchies of relevance, urgency, value, concern, and meaning. When phenomenologically expressed, this recursive significance organization constitutes attentional worldhood—the structured experience of what matters. The theory is examined in relation to network neuroscience, predictive processing, working memory, embodiment, clinical and altered-state phenomena, and empirical testability, and is situated alongside the Metafunctional Theory of Perception within the broader BMF.