Philosophy: What Is Attention?

Attention has always interested me as a subject of thinking, but as a non-psychologist, it’s been difficult for me to get stuck into the study of it. I can search, of course, but it’s not a huge topic when I do so. Instead, what I’m going to do here is a bias, which is a form I use to put forward my personal theory about an idea. From there, when I decide to pick up this line of thought again, I’ll have specific avenues existing already that I want to move forward with. I expect that a lot of my presumptions will be ripped apart when I look into them further; that’s the nature of honest research. I’ve had my own thoughts and done some preliminary reading on the subject. That said, I will be leaving this largely unsourced so that I don’t give off the idea that these are final conclusions.

If you are interested in any further reading, I will suggest you read the article “Attention” by David LaBerge from the May 1990 edition of Psychological Science, which you can get through JSTOR; the specific details discussed there aren’t quite what I’m going to focus on but that gives you a general grounding in what psychological priorities are regarding attention.

My own priorities are about message creation and reception. Propaganda, marketing, promotion, so on and so forth. When I think about attention, I am thinking less about just keeping attention and more about the transmission and retention of specific messages and how that works. In that vein, I’m interested less in the deep psychological processes and more in the broad cause-and-effect. These are linked, of course, I make the point only so you can see why my approach is different than that of LaBerge and other psychologists I’ve read.

The three ideas I want to focus on are 1) the process of noticing, 2) attention as an event, and 3) retention and memory. In order for a message to be appropriately delivered, it must be noticed, it must hold the receiver’s attention while the message is being delivered, and the message must be retained. A concept that will emerge through this is the concept of urgency; I’ll introduce this early but talk more about it later.

Noticing is pretty much what the psychologists would refer to as selection, essentially how one particular stimulus (aka thing) catches our attention over the many other things that could catch our attention. It’s difficult to say exactly how we can narrow down attention, which is to say we can’t be sure how many things or how broad of things people can effectively focus their attention on, but it’s safe to say that it is less than all things that a person is experiencing at once. The particular process by which certain things catch our attention is still up for debate.

I would say that the theories summarized by LaBerge generally view the initial noticing process as being either effectively random or based on prior expectations. For the purposes of this article, let’s say noticing is not just the initial catch but also holding attention for a significant amount of time (longer than a second or two). If we use this definition, there are two major factors in noticing: urgency of stimulus and chance.

Understanding the importance of repetition is one of the main reasons I began investigating attention. I didn’t understand why it was important to repeat messages to people in order to sink in. Now, I am not claiming here to have figured it out, and I don’t even think that this is the entire answer. Still, part of the answer to reptition’s importance is that it purely increases the chance that a message will be noticed.

It’s impossible for the sender of a message to know how many stimuli a receiver is dealing with at any one time. As has been I believe decisively concluded by psychology, there is a limit to how many things a person can process at once. Therefore, even if the sender of a message believes they are sending their message to someone who is available, there is no guarantee that the message has been received. Repetition doesn’t give any reassurance to the sender on its own. However, if there was a problem with receiving the message at opportunity 1, that problem may no longer exist at opportunity 2. Having no way to know, the best solution for the sender is to send at both opportunity 1 and opportunity 2.

Of course, practically, there are hazards in this. There is such a thing as over-repetition. However, the more times a sender transmits their message, the surer they can be that it is being received. This sureness is somewhat illusory but, unless the people involved have a specific reason not to receive the message, further repetition will only increase the chance that available receivers will be found and that each receiver’s availability will be found.

The urgency of a stimulus is a major part of determining whether attention will be fixed on that stimulus. Urgency is determined by the relevance that a stimulus has to the person observing that stimulus. If the observer sees it as highly urgent, they are much more likely to pay attention to it, and vice versa. Therefore, regardless of how a stimulus comes to initial notice, it is really urgency that determines if attention will be held for any significant amount of time. This aspect is less focused on in LaBerge’s paper and related literature but is central in what I’m investigating. Like I said, I’ll talk about urgency some more in a while, but as a final note, it doesn’t refer only to danger or adverse situations.

To summarize this first section, I would say that if a sender wanted to be highly confident that their message would be noticed, they would send a message in a way that was highly repetitive and highly urgent. Hence: clickbait and shock advertising.

When we are talking about messages and symbols, such as film as message, we need to understand attention as an event that occurs in time. In order to efficiently navigate our memories, we as people usually compress things that happen in time into chunks which we then label. We can expand the chunks later, of course, but our understanding is in large part dependent on this chunking or compacting of time. This is important for what comes next – retention – but the process of labeling is dependent on this time bound aspect.

I believe that we label events in our lives according to what I will call their impressions. These are the moments in which our minds solidify their opinions of the event. Every event – that is to say, every stimulus, every thing in someone’s life, every person they know, etc. – has at least one impression: the first impression. This is what it sounds like. Absent anything else, the first impression of an event is going to become the label for that event.

We’ve all heard the cliches about first impressions, so I’ll move on.

If an event happens to conclude, there is also a last impression. I was tempted to say that last impressions would take precedence over first ones but I don’t think that’s always true. It may be if I add some qualifiers but I’m not sure what they would be at this point. Regardless, let’s say that these two are the main impressions which are bound in time.

The third type of impression is the heightened impression, and each event can have an indefinite number of these. Heightened impressions happen when the event becomes sufficiently urgent for the observer. What qualifies as “sufficient urgency” is something that I cannot answer concretely. What I can say is that a heightened impression will almost always take precedence over a first or last impression, unless those impressions are also urgent.

These impressions, as well as the “non-impression” parts of the event, all come together to form one unit when being accessed by the mind, but it’s the impressions that stand out. Impressions can possibly be synthesized in the creation of the label, I will need to read and think more about that question, but it is the impressions which will be primarily remembered, with other elements being accessed through those impressions.

I have already talked a fair bit about retention, but one thing I have not yet talked about is a key part of retention: urgency. Things that are retained in memory are things that are relevant to a person, in large part. Of course, many people remember random things, but more of the things in a person’s memory are things that pertain directly to their lives and are useful to consider in some way. We’ll deal with the majority of thoughts, then. When an event (or part of an event) is urgent, it is more likely to be retained in memory, and urgency is more important to retention that simply having paid attention.

I chose the word “urgency” here because it was more forceful than relevance, which I think is needed. Relevance implies simple connection. Urgency implies a need to act. Urgency shouldn’t be seen as solely a bad thing in this context: if you hear that a concert you want to go to has tickets for sale, that’s an urgent fact. It’s not simply relevant to you, it demands a reaction. This is based, of course, on the network of relations and concepts in each person, which is a topic too complex to start delving into now.

Another concept important to retention is message legibility. This is also related to the idea of attention as an event. I won’t go into it here because I haven’t developed my thoughts on it very much, but I bring it up now because I want to refer to it again in a bit.

In semiotics, there are the concepts of broadcasting and narrowcasting. Using the terms that I’ve laid out here, the difference in the two is primarily in degree. The more repetition and apparent urgency in a message, the broader it is being cast, so to speak. When a message is being broadcast, it is assumed that the intent is for an audience across many different demographics to understand and retain the message.

There’s something that I’ll call “the snob’s problem” to deal with, though. See, when a message is being broadcast, there is a risk that some receivers will begin to view the message and/or the sender negatively because of that fact. We’ll put aside political or other conscious reasons for doing this; I’m talking just about so-called “snobs”, which is to say people who are ostensibly receptive to the message who nevertheless have this negative reaction.

This is basically the phenomenon of “overcommunication”, in my view. Of course, the sender of a message often has limited information on their receivers. Because of this, it’s easy for a sender to continue sending a message when it has already been adequately received by its receivers. If a message has been successfully received, a receiver is often annoyed by receiving it again, and again and again. In this situation, the snobs are people who received the message earlier than anticipated.

I don’t have a solution to the snob’s problem, just like I don’t have a full explanation for any of the phenomena I laid out. I bring it up to give a full picture of what I think is involved in attention as relates to the sending of messages. If you’ve been reading this blog, hopefully you can see the applications of these concepts to pro wrestling, although I’m also thinking about story writing, general marketing, and so on. If I develop these ideas further, you’ll most likely read them on my philosophy site Journal of Cogency (which you should go check out and bookmark now).

This is the end of the article.