Search Results

The starting point for this chapter is attention. Our ability to attend to things and to have our attention drawn to things is a key facet of our mental lives. The prediction error framework is able to encompass many of the central findings on attention and to provide a unifying framework for them within the broader account of prediction error minimization. This allows us to see attention in a new light and to provide alternative conceptualizations of its functional role in our overall mental economy. In particular, the chapter describes the idea that attention is nothing but optimization of precision in hierarchical perceptual inference. This idea is described in terms of classic studies, such as the Posner paradigm, and applied to intriguing case, such as inattentional blindness.

This chapter examines the effects of action video game experience on children's vision, attention, and cognitive skills. It first provides an overview of action video games before turning to a discussion of evidence on how such games affect the spatial and temporal characteristics/resolution of vision and attention, attentional capacity and how attentional resources are distributed, and the players' executive functions. It then considers the neural mechanisms that may underlie the enhanced attentional skills observed in action video game players. It also explores the effects of action video game experience on exogenous attention, along with the view that relates the perceptual and cognitive effects of action video game experience to an increase in the rate at which perceptual information is integrated. The chapter concludes by outlining the lessons from action video games for educational games as tools of learning in the classroom setting.

Attention comes in many different forms. An account of attention needs to show what those forms have in common. This chapter argues that the explanatorily primary form is a mental activity: the activity of attending. This view is motivated from three angles. First, it can show how voluntarily focusing attention, involuntary attention capture, and the attentive performance of another activity are all aspects of a single phenomenon. Second, the activity view of attention is central to the explanation of how there can be perceptual agency, i.e. how a subject’s perceiving can be active in one sense while being passive in another. Third, only the activity view promises to explain why attention is sometimes voluntarily controlled and performed intentionally while it is not always so controlled and not always performed intentionally.