A systems-level perspective on attention and cognitive control: Guided activation, adaptive gating, conflict monitoring, and exploitation vs. exploration, chapter 6

Abstract

An understanding of attention is arguably one of the most important goals of the cognitive sciences and yet also has proven to be one of the most elusive. Most attention researchers will agree that a major problem has been agreeing on a definition of the term and the scope of the phenomena to which it applies. There are no doubt as many explanations for this state of affairs as there are those who consider themselves “attention researchers. ” However, most will probably agree that, in large measure, this is because attention is not a unitary phenomenon—at least not in the sense that it reflects the operation of a single mechanism, or a single function of one or a set of mechanisms. Rather, attention is the emergent property of the cognitive system that allows it to successfully process some sources of information to the exclusion of others, in the service of achieving some goals to the exclusion of others. This begs an important question: If attention is so varied a phenomenon, how can we make progress in understanding it? There are two simple answers to this question: Be precise about the specific (aspects of the) phenomena to be studied, and be precise about the mechanisms thought to explain them. In this chapter, we address a particular type of attentional phenomenon—that associate