- Attention is not a concept researchers fully agree on. What is attention? “No one knows what attention is” (Homel et al, 2019)
Attention in Psychology and Neuroscience
- In its simplest, most generic form , atttention is an overall level of alertness or ability to engage with one’s surrounding.
- Attention can also be related to sensory input. Note to self: is sensory attention different on neurodivergent individuals?
- Sensory inputs habve different dimensions - e.g. spatial attentionand spatial feature attention.
- Attention is also related to executive function.
- When executing a task, attention is highly influenced by history (working memory) and context. This is not a feature of LLMs alone.
- Since working memory is limited, the brain has to dynamically select which parts of the input that are relevant for the task at hand.
- Evidence suggests attention in memory encoding is strong (Aly and Truke-Browne, 2017)
- Memory degrades when individuals execute a main task while trying to engage on a secondary task
References
- Aly M and Turk-Browne NB (2017) ‘How hippocampal memory shapes, and is shaped by, attention’, in Hannula DE and Duff MC (eds) The Hippocampus from Cells to Systems: Structure, Connectivity, and Functional Contributions to Memory and Flexible Cognition, Springer International Publishing, pp 369–403, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-50406-3_12
- Hommel B, Chapman CS, Cisek P, Neyedli HF, Song JH and Welsh TN (2019) ‘No one knows what attention is’, Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 81(7):2288–2303, doi:10.3758/s13414-019-01846-w
- Lindsay GW (2020) ‘Attention in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Machine Learning’, Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, 14:29, doi:10.3389/fncom.2020.00029