Laboratory attention studies are structurally blind to relational value

Evidence

While attention must be understood as an evaluating activity geared towards orientating us with respect to anything that may warrant attaching us to one aspect of our environment rather than another, the function of the laboratory is, as far as possible, precisely to cut us off from those bonds (of attention/evaluation) which attach us to one another and to the things that circulate among us. Laboratories try to produce results that are as weakly subjective and axiological as possible – ‘objective’ results. At the same time that they help us to measure and evaluate the parameters that condition the functioning of our attention, they are condemned to leave undisclosed, as though suspended in the void, everything that is truly incorporated by our individual attention in the relational web in which we live – that whole weave of attachments in which evaluation and valuation are intimately combined. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 395

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Latour’s actor-network theory and to the critique of decontextualized experimental psychology — the lab strips away the attachments that define real-world attention. — connects to: Lab attention findings only confirm old principles of pertinence — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 389; Attention is a superimposition of entangled mechanisms rather than a single faculty — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 360; Attention cannot function as currency without homogenizing measurement — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 163 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Laboratory-defined attention was designed for instrumental task selection from the start. #expands (0.78)
• Attention is a superimposition of entangled mechanisms rather than a single faculty #expands (0.75) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 360
• Attention cannot function as currency without homogenizing measurement #corroborates (0.72) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 163