ReviewAttention, perception & psychophysics2019
No one knows what attention is.
Review in Attention, perception & psychophysics, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 79 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
79 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- A Meta-Analytical Review of Executive Function Skills in Adults Who Stutter.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2026Pooled it
- The neurobiology of functional neurological disorders characterised by impaired awareness.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Pooled it
- The impact of athletic clothing style and body awareness on motor performance in women.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2020Trial
- Dynamic salience as a basis for behavioural meta-malleability.Royal Society open science · 2026Review
- Understanding Attention in Schizophrenia: The Enduring Influence of Barbara Cornblatt.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2026Review
- Article
- Deficient executive control in transformer attention.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Modeling attention and binding in the brain through bidirectional recurrent gating.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Shifting and zooming through space … or not: The role of attention in spatial compatibility tasks - A replication of Stoffer (1991).Psychological research · 2026Article
- Attribution of Selfhood Based on Simple Behavioral Cues: Toward a Pars-Pro-Toto Account.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- Covert-attention shifting superseded: Simple visual search explained by a computational cognitive architecture with early vision limitations, eye movements, and task strategies.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Learning to attenuate myself: a predictive processing account of body-scan meditation and the dissolution of bodily boundaries.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- ERP evidence of attentional selection outside of effective oculomotor range.Experimental brain research · 2025Article
- Action Observation Training for Upper Limb Stroke Rehabilitation: A Pilot Study on the Role of Attention.Journal of clinical medicine · 2025Article
- Article
- Where Is My Mind? The Daydreaming Characteristics Questionnaire, a New Tool to Differentiate Absorptive Daydreaming From Mind-Wandering.Journal of attention disorders · 2025Article
- The consequences of color chromaticity on electrophysiological measures of attentional deployment in visual search.iScience · 2025Article
- Cognitive load affects gaze dynamics during real-world tasks.Experimental brain research · 2025Article
- Perceptual adaptation to dysarthric speech is modulated by concurrent phonological processing: A dual task study.The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2025Article
- The fundamentals of eye tracking part 2: From research question to operationalization.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
19 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In this article, we challenge the usefulness of "attention" as a unitary construct and/or neural system. We point out that the concept has too many meanings to justify a single term, and that "attention" is used to refer to both the explanandum (the set of phenomena in need of explanation) and the explanans (the set of processes doing the explaining). To illustrate these points, we focus our discussion on visual selective attention. It is argued that selectivity in processing has emerged through evolution as a design feature of a complex multi-channel sensorimotor system, which generates selective phenomena of "attention" as one of many by-products. Instead of the traditional analytic approach to attention, we suggest a synthetic approach that starts with well-understood mechanisms that do not need to be dedicated to attention, and yet account for the selectivity phenomena under investigation. We conclude that what would serve scientific progress best would be to drop the term "attention" as a label for a specific functional or neural system and instead focus on behaviorally relevant selection processes and the many systems that implement them.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.