Greetings, Friendlies.:)
In 2006 Anne Treisman published an article describing her explorations into visual attention.
Right out of the gate she defines her terms: “Attention is a tool to adapt what we see to our current needs.”
For many of us, when we hear a noun like “attention”, we tend to reify it. We want to make it into a thing. We want to grasp it in our hands. We want attention to be a hammer.
Reification is a kind of bias and it conditions our inquiry. If I think attention is a thing, when I ask “What is attention?”, I’m already looking for a particular kind of answer. I’m looking for thinginess.
And yet: in the very next paragraph Treisman refers to “the set of control systems that we call attention.”
Systems? Suddenly we’re in the world of activity. Treisman speaks of systems that organize, bind, adapt, represent. “Attention” sounds more like process than thing. There is verb inside the noun.
Understanding this, our tendency to reify can soften. New kinds of answers become possible for us.
Your thoughts?
