KHAS Psychology Webinars – Dr. Alon Zivony

Dr. Alon Zivony from Birkbeck, University of London will be the first guest of the seminar series organized by KHAS Psychology Department Visual Cognition Lab with his speech “The Diachronic Account of Attentional Selectivity” on Friday, February 25, between 16:00-17:00 on Zoom.

Zoom Meeting ID: 870 9446 1954

Abstract: Many models of attention assume that attentional selection takes place at a specific moment in time which demarcates the critical transition from pre-attentive to attentive processing of sensory input. We argue that this intuitively appealing account is not only inaccurate, but has led to substantial conceptual confusion (to the point where some attention researchers offer to abandon the term ‘attention’ altogether). As an alternative, we offer a “diachronic” framework that describes attentional selectivity as a process that unfolds over time. Key to this view is the concept of attentional episodes, brief periods of intense attentional amplification of sensory representations that regulate access to working memory and response-related processes. We present data showing that multiple sequential events can be involuntarily encoded in working memory when they appear during the same attentional episode, whether they are relevant or not. We also discuss the costs associated with processing multiple events within a single episode. We describe how attentional episodes are linked to earlier attentional mechanisms and to recurrent processing at the neural level. Finally, we argue that breaking down the dichotomy between pre-attentive and attentive (as well as early vs. late selection) offers new solutions to old problems in attention research that have never been resolved. It can provide a unified and conceptually coherent account of the network of cognitive and neural processes that produce the goal-directed selectivity in perceptual processing that is commonly referred to as “attention”.