Individual Differences in Attention Control

This chapter outlines the executive attention theory of higher-order cognition, which argues that individual differences in the ability to maintain information in working memory and disengage from irrelevant information is inextricably linked to variation in the ability to deploy domain-free attentional resources in a goal-directed fashion. It also summarizes recent addendums to the theory, particularly regarding the relationship between attention control, working memory capacity, and fluid intelligence. Specifically, the chapter argues that working memory capacity and fluid intelligence measures require different allocations of the same attentional resources, a fact which accounts for their strong correlation. At various points, it addresses theoretical alternatives to the executive attention theory of working memory capacity and empirical complications of the study of attention control, including difficulties deriving coherent attention control latent factors.

Hearing As

Nearly everything ever written by philosophers on aspect perception has been about vision. This chapter catalogs some views and lessons regarding “seeing as,” and argues that not all of them carry over to aspect perception in hearing. In particular, the attention theory, very attractive for the case of vision, is not plausible for hearing. Hearing-as plays at least two central roles in human life. The chapter continues by illustrating them. One is in the appreciation of music: tonality, the ambiguity exploited in harmonic modulation, and the expressing of emotion. The other is in understanding speech: hearing sounds as speech at all, disambiguating utterances, and assigning illocutionary force.

Exploring the relationship between leader narcissism and team creativity

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mediating effect of information search effort on the relationship between leader narcissism and team creativity in China based on attention theory. The paper also explores participative decision making as a moderator in the relationship between team leader narcissism and information search effort. Design/methodology/approach Through a survey of 667 team members and their team leaders from 96 research and development teams at 23 high-tech enterprises in China with paired samples, cross-time data were collected. Confirmatory factor analysis, hierarchical regression and path analysis were adopted to analyze the data. Findings This paper found that leader narcissism had a positive impact on team information search effort, thereby promoting team creativity, and the effect of leader narcissism on team information search effort is more positive in the context of high participation in decision making. Practical implications Narcissism should be a noteworthy trait in manager selection and promotion especially for the departments and teams which focus on innovation and creation. And companies should pay attention to the team work processes to ensure that team members have the opportunity to participate in decision making for promoting the team leader’s narcissistic “bright” side in the institutional environment and avoiding the “dark” side. Originality/value This paper discusses how and when leader narcissism influences team creativity in Chinese high-technology enterprises based on attention theory. This research expands the application of attention theory at the team level.

A computational model of context-dependent encodings during category learning

Although current exemplar models of category learning are flexible and can capture how different features are emphasized for different categories, they still lack in the flexibility to adapt to local pressures in category learning, such as the effect of different sequences of study. In this paper we introduce a new model of category learning, the Sequential Attention Theory Model (SAT-M), in which the encoding of each presented item is influenced not only by its category assignment (global context) as in other exemplar models, but also by how its properties relate to the properties of temporally neighboring items (local context). We demonstrate that SAT-M is able to capture the effect of local context and predict not only learning but also learners’ attentional patterns during learning.