Sam Verschooren and Tobias Egner published “
When the mind’s eye prevails: “The Internal Dominance over External
Attention (IDEA) hypothesis“. The IDEA hypothesis asserts, contrary to the traditional view of attention as being primarily externally oriented, that attention is inherently biased toward internal information.
That is, when information in the external (i.e., perception) and internal (i.e., memory) environment is activated simultaneously, the latter more readily enters the focus of attention. For example, when we are attending a lecture, there may exist a competition between directing attention toward the information that is (externally) presented during a lecture or toward internally generated information, such as memories of a beautiful hiking trip in the mountains.
The thickness of the upper arrow represents the bias or pull of attention toward the latter kind of information, despite the incentives to attend externally
Mine inner sense predominates in such a way over my five senses that I see things in this life—I do believe it—in a way different from other men.
Pessoa, 1966
The foremost implication of the IDEA hypothesis is a recognition that our conscious life is mostly internally oriented, especially in stable contexts, even if we are not consistently aware of it.
The IDEA hypothesis, has two key theoretical points that need resolving. The first one: “why attention would be biased internally in the first place” can be addressed by referring to the stable and predictable environments in which human cognition has evolved and usually takes place. In these types
of environments, we can rely on our internal models and free up resources for further processing of internal information, which consolidates the internal bias.
The second one concerns “the exact manner in which IDEA is implemented“, which is still an open question. The IDEA hypothesis primarily reflects a phenomenon or outcome and, as such, it might be sustained by several mechanisms.
I like the IDEA, and consider it related to & a interesting complement to the ideas presented in ‘Peter Pan‘ on my blog.
Surtil : 
One response to “The IDEA (Internal Dominance over External Attention )”
[…] Internal Dominance over External Attention (IDEA) hypothesis (I referred to earlier) asserts, contrary to the traditional view of attention as being primarily externally oriented, […]
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