DISTRACT seminar with Søren Kyllingsbæk: Attention and Intentions

Friday the 25th of February, Professor in Cognitive Psychology, Department of Psychology and Department of Computerscience, Søren Kyllingsbæk gave a talk at the first DISTRACT Seminar of the semester. 

Title: Attention and Intentions

Abstract: 
”Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.” These are the famous words written by the “Father” of American psychology, Williams James in 1890. Classically, the concept of attention covered both focusing of the mind on object in the external world as well as thoughts in the internal world. However, in modern psychological science the two concepts have drifted apart in two separate research fields trying to explain attention and intentions, respectively. I will present a well-established neural theory of visual attention as well as a novel theory of intention selection. Both theories are formal and can be formulated as computational models explaining behavior in terms of psychological meaningful mechanisms and concepts. Moreover, the models build on a simple and similar conception of a stochastic race between objects or intentions that may enable a unification of the two theories in a general theory of cognitive selection.

Søren Kyllingsbæk holds a position as Professor in Cognitive Psychology, Department of Psychology and Department of Computerscience, University of Copenhagen.