Our attention is what shapes our mental lives. The things we pay attention to make a substantial difference to our experience of the world, our emotional state and our interactions with others. Nowadays, attention has even become a resource that big corporations compete for grabbing every day, in what has been called “an economy of attention”. This seminar explores the nature of attention as well as its relevance for foundational philosophical problems, combining perspectives from contemporary analytic philosophy and cognitive science.
Session 1:
Why do we need a philosophy of attention?
Reading:
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Watzl, S. (2017). "Beyond brain mechanisms"
Session 2:
Reading:
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Fazekas, P., and Nanay, B. (2021). "Attention is amplification, not selection"
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Castro, C., & Pham, A. (2020). "Is the economy of attention noxious?"
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Evans, C. O. "Free will and attention"
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Coleman, D. “Attention regulates emotion: Focus and self control”
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Lindsay, G.W. (2020). “Attention in psychology, neuroscience and machine learning.”
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Mole, C. (2021). "Attention" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry)
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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. (2018). "Who needs a theory 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”
Session 4:
Attention and epistemic goodness
Readings:
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Siegel, S. (2017). "Selection effects"
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Irving, Z. (2019). "Attention norms"
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Project Implicit (detect your own unconscious biases
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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."
Session 6:
Attention, salience and virtue
Reading:
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Yetter-Chappell, H. and Yetter-Chappell, R. (2015)."Virtue and salience"
Session 7:
Attention and moral difference-makers
Reading:
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Vance, J. and Werner, P. (2022)."Attentional moral perception"
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Moral Machine (participate in a trolley dilemma online experiment)
Studies on moral pop-out and binocular rivalry
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Anderson et al (2011). "The visual impact of gossip
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Gantman & Van Bavel (2014). "The moral pop-out effect"
Studies on eye-tracking and moral dilemmas:
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Decety, J., et al (2012). "The contribution of emotion and cognition to moral sensitivity"
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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"
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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."
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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 8:
Attention, action and responsibility
Reading:
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Jennings, C. (2020)."Attention, action and responsibility"
Session 9:
How attention alters consciousness
Reading:
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Watzl, S. (2017)."Beyond appearances"
Session 10:
Consciousness outside attention
Reading:
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Jennings, C. (2015)."Consciousness without attention"
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Inattentional blindness demo
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Change blindness demo
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Iconic memory demos:
- Easy
- Hard
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Illustration of high & low frequency filters
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Lucas Battich's Ph.D. dissertation, The Nature of Joint Attention: Perception and Other Minds.
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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).
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Bruya, B., ed. (2010). Effortless attention (a collection of essays on skilled action, flow and top-down control).