If someone grabs your attention at a party, and there happens to be a deep connection, then this brief moment of attentiveness will have a decisive impact on your sentimental life (romantic love or long-term friendship). If you ignore this person because you are distracted looking for someone else, your life will be impoverished from this potential benefit. In a more dangerous context, if you are distracted for a split second and don’t pay attention to the road while you are driving, resulting in a bad accident, this brief moment of inattention could have grave consequences for your future. Paying attention at the exact moment, right before the accident, is critical to avoid tragic consequences.

Clearly, and fortunately, not all cases of attention or inattention are as dramatically consequential. But it is equally clear that various types of attention, both the highly consequential and the more habitual or safe varieties, have a profound impact on our lives. In all cases, attention is a cognitive resource—it is selectively allocated to process certain contents or experiences because focused attention is limited. No one ever pays attention to everything that could possibly be relevant. Too much happens at any point in time. We only pay attention to what is most salient to us, based on our interests, goals, and motivations. Thus, attention is a kind of cognitive orientation.

A perceptual kind of orientation
In fact, attention provides the most important, basic, and at the same time selective kind of cognitive orientation on which we rely and depend to succeed at performing many tasks. Perceptual attention orients all kinds of organisms in their environments—insects, reptiles, and mammals—towards the satisfaction of their goals and needs. For instance, bees selectively attend to the spatial orientation of food-relevant locations by interpreting their “waggle dances.” Similar forms of orientation guide the vast world of animal cooperation and communication. This perceptual kind of orientation is just the beginning of the process of sorting and selecting relevant information from the environment, including peers. As social groups grow in number, increasing hierarchical pressures and expectations, the number of attentional needs grows considerably. In the case of humans (and many animals), the new salient anchors of social attention include our own and others’ communicative intentions and emotional needs.

As these examples show, the guidance that attention provides must be delivered in a timely fashion for it to be relevant for conscious experience. Since we have a wide variety of informational needs (representational, emotional, moral, epistemic, aesthetic), this is no easy task. It is indeed remarkable that attention manages to remain selective and efficient in the midst of so much potentially relevant information. Attention must be finely calibrated to contextual information, its relevance, and the adequate timing required to allocate attentive resources to orient the agent in a useful and fruitful way. Ideally, it must deliver the right content, at the right moment, and for the right reasons. How does attention manage to perform this feat? An answer to this question must begin with a description of attention as a kind of mental activity, deeply associated with who we are as agents.

Timing is a key entry point into the complexities of attention. Short-term omissions can have long-term effects, and learned biases and goals regulate and shape short-term allocations of attention. An overall structure of diverse orientations emerges from the way in which we place certain needs at the top of our attentional hierarchy of personal preferences, and fundamentally, on how our attention makes these needs constantly salient, sometimes addictively, and at the expense of other desires and preferences.

Selective attention sculpts our interests, passions, and addictions. It works like an irrigation system, keeping motivations and needs flowing regularly and vigorously through the cognitive space containing our most salient objectives (which we can refer to as consciousness). This is essential for our cognitive development, education, and upbringing. It is also essential for keeping us aroused without falling into overexcitement and addiction, or boredom and depression.

A background for collective action
With regard to the social implications of attention, we can identify joint attention as a powerful kind of communal action and orientation. Communication through shared attention to referents and plans creates a background for collective action and trustworthy social exchanges. A pack of wolves can have thirty eyes jointly attending to an orchestrated hunt. The members of a herd of elephants follow the matriarch through vast expanses of land to satisfy their needs. Humans have gone beyond any species in this regard. We have developed by far the most complex and comprehensive systems of joint attention structures with norms and a formal syntax for fine-grained meanings, including scientific theories and mathematics. Linguistic skills, which are refined via social interactions, presuppose remarkably robust kinds of joint attention for syntax processing, meaning comprehension, and the identification of the communicative intentions of other speakers, such as truthfulness, pretense, or humor.

The landscape of joint attention for humans has dramatically increased with social media, which creates opportunities as well as risks concerning social bias and distraction. This has inherently detrimental implications for our epistemic agency and conscious experiences. How can we be sure that our attentive biases and orientations are truly relevant for our basic needs for survival and personal needs to improve our state of being?

In our current technologically produced environments, our collective actions and joint attention routines have become truly global and constant through the omnipresent screens of our devices (at least for a majority of the earth’s population). A frenetic demand for joint attention in commerce has commodified our attention skills in ways that are detrimental to other, less addictive, and more relevant types of attention. We should resist this dominant tendency that embeds our attentive capacities in long-term plans imposed by markets to force our expected behavior to consume and click, thereby homogenizing our interests and goals in the interest of often unnecessary consumerism (whether commercial, political, or ideological). A recalibration of our selective attention can help restore the autonomy and vivacity of our epistemic agency (and individualism).

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