The dominant scientific definition of attention as task-selection is the foundational lie.

Evidence

So, what is the lie? It is a claim about the nature of attention. It is the lie that attention “is,” as the cognitive neuroscientists put it, “selection for a task.” That attention “is” this narrow, specific, measurable characteristic of mental “focus”—a stimulus-and-response feature of the human organism when it is being tested for its capacity to track, trigger, and “vigilate.” — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 167

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Pins down exactly what the manifesto claims is being falsely equated with the whole of attention: selection-for-a-task.
• QUESTION: Is the ‘selection for a task’ definition actually the consensus neuroscientific view, or a strawman of a more varied literature? Worth checking.

Related

• Cognitive neuroscience officially defines attention as selection for a task (similarity 0.95)
• Laboratory-defined attention was designed for instrumental task selection from the start. (similarity 0.88)
• Recovering the cybernetic version of attention would only refit people for task-selection (similarity 0.83)
• Most people equate attention with screen-based task focus (similarity 0.81)
• Attention can be defined beyond action and receptivity (similarity 0.81)
• The modern measured notion of attention poorly captures lived human attention. (similarity 0.81)
• Attention is the defining political and existential question of the current era (similarity 0.81)
• Attention is the mind’s selective possession of one focus amid several possible ones. (similarity 0.80)
• The attention economy rests on a hidden false premise about attention. (similarity 0.80)
• Attention is the fundamental medium of all human connection (similarity 0.80)
• Attention science defined attention as visual, durational, and cybernetic to fit its funders’ tools (similarity 0.79)
• Modern ‘attention’ is a narrowed, instrumentalized construct far removed from lived human attention. (similarity 0.79)
• Attention is learned rather than innate, always and for everyone (similarity 0.79)
• Defining attention as action-catalyzer reduces attentional life to a cascade of incitements (similarity 0.79)
• A lie about attention has become invisible by embedding itself in everyday institutions (similarity 0.78)