Wayne Wu, “Attention” (Routledge, 2014)
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What metaphors are used to describe attention and why do they matter?
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Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talese, Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Wayne Wu, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. His new book, Attention, is just out from Routledge as part of its New Problems in Philosophy series. The mental phenomenon of attention is often thought of metaphorically as a kind of spotlight.
We focus our attention on a particular item or task. Our attention is divided or diffused when we try to text and drive at the same time. And our attention is captured when we suddenly hear our name pop out from the conversational hubbub of a noisy party. But what is attention? How seriously should we take this or other metaphors as giving us insight into the nature of attention? It is Newbook who argues for the view that attention is selection for action and is distinct from consciousness. This controversial position pits him against more common views that attention is in some sense essentially connected to consciousness. That it is, for example, a kind of gatekeeper for consciousness. He draws on empirical literature from psychology and neuroscience to develop his view, while acknowledging how difficult it is to interpret results so as to support one theory or another.
Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Wayne, are you there?
Yes, I'm here.
Hi, welcome to New Books and Philosophy.
It's great to be here. Thanks for having me, Carrie.
I'm very happy to be talking with you about your new book, Attention. It's a very interesting and I should say hot topic, I think, today. And this is one of the first, I guess, full explorations, you know, just... focused on the topic of attention, goes from empirical work in psychology, neuroscience, to various theories, you know, both from scientists and from philosophers. And you stake out a very, what I think would be controversial position, where you defend what you call a selection for action account that distinguishes professionals attention from uh from consciousness or at least from phenomenal consciousness you know that's part of the the lay of the land that we will we'll discuss um before we get to the book itself uh maybe you could tell us a little bit about yourself uh how you got into philosophy your interest in this particular topic and then how you came to write the book
Yeah, sure. So currently I'm an associate professor in the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at Carnegie Mellon University.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What metaphors are used to describe attention and why do they matter?
0:00–16:32
2
How does Wayne Wu’s academic background lead him to study attention?
16:32–28:31
3
What are the three main categories of attention theories that Wu outlines?
28:31–49:11
4
How do visual‑search and spatial‑cueing paradigms illustrate different kinds of attention?
49:11–1:05:58
5
Why does Wu argue that attention is a unified phenomenon despite apparent disunity?
1:05:58–1:07:12
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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