The English word ‘attention’ can be used loosely. As a tactic for preventing an enquiry into attention’s relationship to consciousness from lapsing into ill-definition, we shall treat ‘attention’ as a term to be defined by the role that is assigned to it in our explanations of empirically established psychological phenomena (especially those involving the modulation of reaction times). We will...
It has recently become popular to suggest that cognition can be explained as a process of Bayesian prediction error minimization. Some advocates of this view propose that attention should be understood as the optimization of expected precisions in the prediction-error signal (Clark, 2013, 2016; Feldman & Friston, 2010; Hohwy, 2012, 2013). This proposal successfully accounts for several...