The Problem of Captured Attention

Readers of the Brains blog might know about a symposium there concerning a paper by Philipp Koralus. In his commentary on the paper, Felipe de Brigard mentions the problem of captured attention: 

"I have a hard time understanding how ETA may account for involuntary attention. Suppose you are focused on your task—reading a book at the library, say—and you hear a ‘bang’ behind you. A natural way of describing the event is to say that one’s attention has been involuntarily captured by the sound. Now, how does ETA explain this phenomenon?"

Koralus' response is binary: 

"So, you might have been asking, as part of your task of reading the blog, 'What does the blog say?' Now, you are getting the incongruent and irrelevant answer 'There’s a loud noise behind you.' There are now two possibilities, similar to what happens in the equivalent case in a conversation. One possibility is that you accommodate the answer, adopting a new question (and thereby a new task) to which 'There’s a loud noise behind you' would be a congruent answer, maybe, 'what sort of thing going on behind me?...You could also refuse to be distracted and then exercise some top-down control on your focus assignment to bring it back to something that’s relevant to your task.'

When I coined "the problem of captured attention" in my 2012 Synthese paper, "The Subject of Attention" (not cited by Koralus/de Brigard), I took a similar line, but focused on the activity of the subject, rather than on questions and answers:

"Husserl would likely say of the above examples of the large text, the colorful advertisement, and the annoying conversation that the subject is active in allowing him or herself to be distracted; the large text, the colorful advertisement, and the annoying conversation could be actively suppressed by the subject with effort, but are instead allowed to disrupt the subject’s thoughts because the subject 'turns toward' the distracting stimuli in willfully allowing them to intrude. A sign that this turning toward is active in the case of captured attention is that there are instances where the same stimulus does not serve as a distraction—where the large text, the colorful advertisement, and the annoying conversation do not manage to disrupt one’s stream of thought because of greater attention to that stream of thought. It is a comparison with these instances that warrants the claim that the subject actively allows the capture of attention to occur when the subject finds him or herself distracted."

This Husserl-inspired position of mine on the problem of captured attention is not well-loved. Many seem to have the intuition that there is nothing one could do about captured attention, not just that the force of the capturing stimulus is relatively strong. For example, at the 2012 Eastern APA meeting Steven James commented on my paper as follows: 

"The weaker claim that 'attention is a process of mental selection that is within control of the subject' identifies a purported (and very plausible) property of attention--whatever it is, attention is something that is at least sometimes subject to agential control. Of course, this is consistent with some instances of attention being mere occurrences, as for example, when one finds her attention grabbed by the sound of her own name spoken in an unattended conversation. In such cases, the subject does not initially direct the selection of a target stimulus at all but rather simply finds her focus drawn to it."

I wrote on the handout for that talk the following response:

"The fact that attention is sometimes felt as relatively passive, as being drawn rather than directed, is not evidence, I claim, that the subject failed to direct attention to the target. There is a difference in kind between reflexive and non-reflexive response that does not meet that between active and passive attention. That is, all attention involves some goal on the side of the subject and some fulfillment on the side of the object, and these can come in different degrees."

In Q & A at that talk I went on to discuss some empirical work on this topic. Numerous papers discuss the ways in which seemingly captured attention relies on intention, task, and working memory, which I take to support my claim that attention can be relatively passive or active, but that even so-called "captured attention" is not captured against the intentions of the subject (e.g. here and here).

I would like to revisit this topic and wonder whether readers of NewAPPS have examples that they think count for and/or against my thesis on the problem of captured attention. (Feel free to weigh in without reading my paper or the papers linked to above.)