Philosophy of Attention
A seminar for M.A. and advanced B.A. students
Readings:
Session 1: "Beyond brain mechanisms"
Session 2: "Attention is amplification, not selection"
Session 3: "The subject of attention"
Session 4: "Selection effects" + "Attention norms"
Session 5: "The ethics of attention"
Session 6: "Virtue and salience"
Session 7: "Attentional moral perception"
Session 8: "Attention, action and responsibility"
Session 9: "Beyond appearances"
Session 10: "Consciousness without attention"
Session 11: "Joint attention and perceptual experience"
Session 12: "Free will and Necker’s cube"
Session 13: "Do we reflect when we perform skilful actions?"
Session 13
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Bruya, B., ed. (2010). Effortless attention (a collection of essays on skilled action, flow and top-down control).
Session 12
-
Fisher, Kane, Pereboom & Vargas (2007). Four Views of Free Will.
Session 11
-
Lucas Battich's Ph.D. dissertation, The Nature of Joint Attention: Perception and Other Minds.
-
Friedenberg & Silverman (2016), Ch. 11: "The social approach: Mind as society" (joint attention is discussed in pp.12-14 of the pdf, but the whole chapter is interesting).
Session 10
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Change blindness demo
-
Iconic memory demos:
- Easy
- Hard
-
Illustration of high & low frequency filters
Session 7
-
Moral Machine (participate in a trolley dilemma online experiment)
Studies on moral pop-out and binocular rivalry:
-
Anderson et al (2011). "The visual impact of gossip"
-
Gantman & Van Bavel (2014). "The moral pop-out effect"
Studies on eye-tracking and moral dilemmas:
-
Decety, J., et al (2012). "The contribution of emotion and cognition to moral sensitivity"
-
Garon et al (2018). "Visual encoding of social cues predicts sociomoral reasoning"
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Garon et al (2018). "Visual encoding of social cues contributes to moral reasoning in Autism Spectrum Disorder"
-
Kastner, R. (2011). "Moral judgments and visual attention"
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Skulmowski, A., et al (2014). "Forced-choice decision-making in modified trolley dilemma situations"
Studies on cheating and generosity:
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Hochman et al (2016). "Biased processing and increased arousal in dishonest responses."
-
Rahal et al (2020). "Prosocial preferences condition decision effort and ingroup biased generosity in intergroup decision-making"
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Teoh et al (2020). "Attentional priorities drive effects of time pressure on altruistic choice"
Session 4
-
Project Implicit (detect your own unconscious biases)
-
Siegel, S. (2017). The Rationality of Perception.
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Sripada, C. (2018). "An exploration/exploitation trade-off between mind- wandering and goal-directed thinking."
Sessions 1-3
-
Mole, C. & Henry, A. (2017), “What is attention? Adverbialist theories”
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Reynolds, J.H. & Heeger, D.J. (2009). “The normalization model of attention.”
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Watzl, S. (2011), “Attention as structuring the stream of consciousness”
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Wu, W. (2011). “Attention as selection for action”
Warm-up readings
Why should you care about attention?
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Sebastian Watzl, “Who needs a theory of attention?”
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Clinton Castro & Adam Pham, “Is the economy of attention noxious?”
-
C. O. Evans, “Free will and attention”
-
Dan Goleman, “Attention regulates emotion: Focus and self control”
The philosophical landscape:
-
Attention (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry)
The science of attention:
-
Grace W. Lindsay, “Attention in psychology, neuroscience and machine learning.”

Handouts & slides:
1. Why do we need a philosophy of attention?
2. The Amplification View of attention
3. Attention as a process we control
4. Epistemic norms of attention + Slides
5. Towards an ethics of attention + Isabel's slides
6. Salience as an indicator of virtue + Thomas' slides
7. How attention might pick up moral difference-makers
8. The role of attention in action, responsibility and free will +
Rafael's slides
9. How attention alters consciousness
10. Is there consciousness outside attention?
11. Beyond individual attention + Anpeng's slides
12. Attention and free will slides
13. Attention in skilful action + Fabian's slides
Bonus: Wrapping-up slides