Movements of Mind

“Wayne Wu, Movements of the Mind: A Theory of Attention, Intention and Action, Oxford University Press, 2023”

“This book puts forward a theory of action”

“It synthesises Wayne Wu’s extensive work on action and attention going back over a decade, and also substantially extends this foundation”

“Wu’s approach involves linking the theory of action to empirical work on working memory and attention”

“In presenting a framework for thinking about action and attention, the book necessarily covers a lot of terrain”

“For Wu, action is most helpfully understood in terms of the ‘selection problem’”

“This issue is faced by agents who have many potential inputs that could inform their actions, and many potential outputs. Here the ‘outputs’ (which Wu calls ‘responses’) may involve physical behaviour, or they may not. The challenge, for us as agents, is to link up (or ‘couple’) the appropriate input with the appropriate response”

“The space of potential inputs, potential responses, and possible couplings between them are what Wu calls a ‘behaviour space’”

“In previous work, Wu has referred to this kind of behaviour space as presenting a ‘many-many problem’ (2011). There are many inputs, and many potential responses, and action involves selecting the correct path through this confusion”

“The coupling between input and response is influenced by the agent’s biases. Biases help to solve the selection problem, by helping to chart a path between input and response”

“According to Wu, an agent’s intentions are a form of bias, but there are others, which need not fit with the subject’s intentions”

“Wu claims that all action involves biases, and also that all action involves a certain amount of automaticity”

“Attention is centre-stage in this theory of action. Wu relies on a taxonomy of attention that chops it up into three kinds: vigilance (the disposition to attend to a certain stimulus when it arises), attending (the action of paying attention to something) and attention-in-action (attention’s role in guiding action)”

“Solving the selection problem involves taking an input and using it to inform (or guide) a response. For Wu, this kind of guidance from input to response is attention (63)”

“Wu (somewhat briefly) links his picture to the celebrated ‘biased competition’ model of attention. According to this view, attention is the result of different neural mechanisms ‘competing’ with each other so that their information can be processed further. Given limited processing capacity in the brain, the bias part comes in when one neural mechanism is selected for further processing because its information is task-relevant (Desimone and Duncan 1995)”

“Wu links his theory of action to empirical models of working memory (e.g., Baddeley and Logie 1999)”

“It is a multi-component, short-term, limited capacity memory system, which stores and manipulates information in a variety of formats”

“The currently dominant model of working memory includes subcomponents for linguistic and visual information, known as the phonological loop and the visuo-spatial sketchpad respectively (Baddeley 2003)”

“Another of the subcomponents of working memory is the central executive. The central executive is in charge of controlling the distribution of attention in order to ensure that it is directed to the appropriate stimuli to fulfil the task that the agent is undertaking”

“Here is one of Wu’s most important claims: the central executive, which features in theories of working memory, is an empirical explication of the notion of intention (104–110)”

“The psychological explication of this notion of intention (claims Wu) is to be found in working memory’s central executive, since this faculty is what controls the allocation of attention to task-relevant stimuli. Wu then uses this picture to explain the role of intention in on-going action”

“Understanding intention in terms of the central executive can only be explanatory insofar as we have a grip on what the central executive is. It’s easy to get a metaphorical grasp on the central executive. It’s the boss of working memory: assigning attentional resources to the most relevant tasks. But what kind of grasp on the central executive do we have, beyond the metaphor?”

“Wu is aware of this problem, commenting that some psychologists have expressed scepticism about the concept of a ‘central executive’. The essence of the worry is as follows. Postulating an ‘executive’ in charge of guiding attention in working memory to task-relevant stimuli can feel a bit too much like the postulation of a homunculus (102)”