Richard J. Krauzlis, Anil Bollimunta, Fabrice Arcizet, Lupeng Wang, ‘Attention as an Effect not a Cause’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18 (2014), 457-64.

I’m often interested by the ways in which cognitive scientists try to relate higher human capacities (consciousness being a particularly tricky case) to more basic functions that we largely share with animals (perception, for example). There seem to me to be lively, crucial, and unresolved debates about how to understand these higher capacities, which may be capable of managing and directing the more basic functions, or which may be by-products of those functions. It’s an ongoing question whether something like consciousness is a thing at all, and whether or not it’s something that utterly divides humans from other animals.
      In this article Krauzlis et al. take a critical look at attention. In their view, it may not be right to think of attention as a kind of oversight over limited perceptual resources. Rather, they portray it merely as a ‘by-product’ of ‘value-based decision-making’. That is, what seems to us like a directable and distractable aspect of consciousness is more likely to be determined by evolved mechanisms to assess ‘the animal and its environment’ and to foster productive decision-making. Attention doesn’t guide us to what matters, it is the result of a set of unconscious (and relatively primitive – though this is not the term of Krautzlis et al., and I am holding at arm’s length to the point of near-deletion… but not quite) calculations about where the situational priorities in the environment are to be found.
      I have thought quite a lot about attention in Shakespeare’s plays, and tried to deal with some difficult questions. How do they seem to think an audience’s attention can be directed? How do these assumptions fit the ways scientists think, and/or how are they conditioned by his first viewers’ environments, especially in the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres? One scene that has been of interest is the last one in Measure for Measure. Amid all the tense and qualified mercy and reconciliation of the last scene, one figure stands out: Barnardine. He is a criminal who was (on the play’s terms) deservedly headed for execution, but he has been drawn into the plot and benefits from an undeserved reprieve.
      To say he ‘stands out’ is not quite accurate. The interesting thing might be that he does not. There is so much else to attend to on the stage, and of course many of these things are more urgent, more emotionally engaging, and actually more problematic (because an act of gratuitous leniency isn’t so troubling as a patched-up marriage scenario like that between Angelo and Mariana). I think it’s of some interest to think about how and why a character might be disregarded on literary grounds, and what relation that might have to the cognitive characteristics of regarding and disregarding. It may be only a small adjustment to our sense of a scene like the one in Measure for Measure, to see our tendency to ignore Barnardine as the result of an unconscious ‘value-based decision-making’ rather than of something more like conscious allocation of attention.
      It may have a bit more significance as an indication of what Shakespeare was working with, and working on. Barnardine is not just there in order to be ignored, of course. He is there to make an issue of that ignoring, to bring whatever part of the mind is bothered by his presence into dialogue with that part of the mind that focuses on its own advantage and what looks like the advantage of everyone. Some think that Barnardine comes close to taking over the play, or at least that he represents a vital resistant voice. Even without going this far, it is still worth thinking, in the light of Krautzlis et al., and somewhat in the face of Krautzlis et al., that there is another kind of attention that matters a lot, a deliberate choice to look at the things which do us no favours, but which reveal the problems in the set-up that our instincts incline towards accepting.