Allocating attention and selecting an action across space and time

What we pay attention to largely determines the contents of our experience. It is therefore not surprising that so much research effort has been expended to determine the rules by which we allocate our attention. Current research on this topic converges on two tenets. The first is that where we allocate our attention next depends on the combined influence of stimulus salience, our goals as well as what we have recently attended (selection history) on a general priority map - with the influence of selection history accounting for a large part of the influence previously attributed to goals. The second is that at any given moment, attention is automatically shifted to the location with the highest priority on that general map. In this talk, I will present work that mitigates both assertions. In the first part, I will claim that theories that have developed around the concept of a priority map have typically ignored insights from research on temporal attention, and therefore do not fully account for how information is dynamically prioritized in space and time. I will present evidence supporting the Priority Accumulation framework (PAF), which provides an account of how temporal attention interacts with the priority map to determine how we allocate our attention in a dynamic world. In the second part, I will claim that the influence of selection history in attentional guidance is often overestimated in current research, because it typically fails to acknowledge the role response selection. unknown unknown