Construct · 5 fields · 10 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one name, five constructs Nearest construct by meaningattention-based viewcompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to attention is attention-based view.
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The selection of some inputs for processing at the expense of others, "the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought," in James's phrase. Broadbent made it a bottleneck: a limited-capacity channel with a filter in front of it. Everything since has argued about where the filter sits and whether capacity is one pool or several, but the construct is selection under limitation.[1][2]
Not one thing but three anatomically separable systems: alerting (sustaining a ready state), orienting (moving selection toward a location or object), and executive control (resolving conflict among responses). Posner and Petersen proposed the split from lesion and imaging data; the Attention Network Test gives each network its own score from a single reaction-time task, and the scores are close to independent.[3][4]
A cluster of behaviours (failing to sustain focus, being easily distracted, losing things, not seeming to listen) that, together with hyperactivity and impulsivity, defines attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Barkley argued the core deficit is not attention at all but behavioural inhibition; the diagnostic label kept the word anyway. Measured by symptom count against a threshold, usually by self- or informant report.[5][6][7]
The thing information consumes. Simon's observation ("a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention") turned attention into an economic quantity: a finite budget that senders compete for and receivers allocate. The unit is aggregate and the measures are behavioural proxies: time on page, impressions, engagement. Nothing about selection mechanisms or networks survives the translation.[8]
A differentiable operation that computes a weighted sum over a set of inputs, with weights given by the similarity between a query and each input's key. Introduced for machine translation so a decoder could "look back" at any source word, then made the whole architecture in the Transformer. The name is a metaphor for the cognitive meaning (soft selection) but the object is a matrix operation with no capacity limit, no filter, and no perceiver.[9][10]
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