Attention schema theory, an interdisciplinary turn? Cognition, culture and institutions

Abstract

Moving beyond the distinction between biological and social facts has proved challenging due to several basic methodological and ontological differences among scientific disciplines. The aim of this paper is to show how attention schema theory (hereafter AST), developed by Michael Graziano, provides a useful addition to existing integrative approaches that can be used to overcome impediments to interdisciplinary crossfertilization, such that the influence of a range of interconnected institutional, situational, biographical, psychological, neural and genetic variables can be considered simultaneously in a parsimonious way. The paper provides an overview of three basic methodological and ontological differences dividing scientists researching human nature and society. It then draws on AST and a selection of existing approaches in the interdisciplinary vein to demonstrate how to move beyond the reductionist tendencies of each discipline. In the view of AST, intrinsic brain processes and social and situational aspects are intricately intertwined and continuously influence each other in shaping specific attentional focuses. Social identities, biographical experiences, symbols, roles and subject positions contribute to directing attention to certain kinds of stimuli, details, or information, while at the same time, intrinsic predispositions make individuals inclined to attend to different types of information. By accounting for the brain basis of awareness as a subjective experience, AST can be used to clarify how social identities influence attention, and thus, the linkages between individual cognition and wider institutional structures. Finally, the paper considers the relationships between the cognitive and the institutional levels of analysis, and highlights the importance of the latter as a distinct level of analysis. In this way, the paper charts the multidirectional and interactive causal relationship between intrinsic brain processes, attention and conscious awareness, and how they relate to wider institutional structures and joint attentional interactions at higher levels of aggregation. In the last few decades, a move towards interdisciplinary reconciliation and crossfertilization has occurred against the background of scientific findings emphasizing brain plasticity that have rendered the notion of the biological and the social as distinct domains untenable (Bloch, 2012;Fuentes, 2016;Lende and Downey, 2012;Reyna, 2002Reyna, , 2006. This shift has implications for all sciences dealing with human cognition and social organization. By engaging with neuroscience and other more narrow cognitive and biological behavioral sciences using a holistic approach, rather than ignoring them on the ground that they are reductionistic, anthropologists and other social scientists can provide important criticisms of, and correctives to, the prevalent 'neurohubris' trend and the seductive appeal of often ambiguous and rather limited neuroscience findings (Birth, 2007;Fuentes, 2016;Lende and Downey, 2012;Satel and Lili...

Unraveling customer experiences in a new servicescape: an ethnographic schema elicitation technique (ESET)

“…Attention schema theory provides a useful explanation; it posits that the brain selectively augments the most prominent and urgent incoming stimuli and then consciously or subconsciously relates them to existing memories (Greve et al , 2019). Frödin (2017, p. 96) defines attention as the process of:binding together prevailing sensory data, be they visual, emotional, cultural, or action oriented, stemming from interconnected brain modules and networks, and/or to varying degrees produced, enhanced or suppressed by specific social, cultural or situational aspects, into a single, unified representation, or a single coherent state.…”

Storage of Information and Its Implications for Human Development: A Dialectic Approach

“…It is argued that attention and the attention schema co-evolved over roughly 500 million years. Apart from applications in machine learning and AI, the theory also offers some clues as to how cultural and environmental phenomena became integrated with, and eventually modified, cognition ( Graziano, 2013 ; Frödin, 2017 ). In particular, it offers an inter-disciplinary model for how social and natural events, as well as internal cognitive processes, may act in concert and together modify consciousness.…”

“…There are a few gaps in this theory worth pointing out here. First, underlying AST is a static representation of the mind-brain, where an “architecture” structures “general external parameters for the types of connections, cognitive styles, and forms of sociality that humans can activate and draw on” ( Frödin, 2017 , p. 15). Mind-brain “architecture” is conceived of as a condition of evolution while society may change it over time, however, there is little explanation of the dynamics of these changes.…”

The Power of Senses

“…Integrate multidisciplinary conceptual and theoretical roots of sensory research beyond service research's boundaries to generate multisensory CSE understanding and move the service research field forward Conceptualize multisensory integration in CSE and develop a methodological approach to study this process Multidisciplinary perspective on sensory dimension of CSE Zooming in on the multisensory integration that shapes CSE  Service-dominant logic (Vargo and Lusch 2004)  Theories of planned behavior and reasoned action (Ajzen 1991)  Goal-directed attention (Corbetta et al 2008); stimulus-driven visual attention (Gazzaniga 2011) Cross-modal correspondence (Spence 2011)  Attention schema theory (Webb, and Graziano, 2015)  Schema (dis)congruity effect (Noseworthy et al 2014)  Embodied cognition (Frödin 2017 In Manuscript 3, I unravel the underlying process that shapes CSE. In this empirical study, I introduce the concept of schemas, which are knowledge structures of existing memories that form our meanings and guide our responses.…”

“…In the literature the embodied cognition, implies that the body shapes the mind, and the mind shapes bodily actions (Clark, 1998). Frödin (2017) shows that people connect encountered stimuli with existing schemas, which leads to an implicit connection between body-related and awareness-related schema that guides cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses. Accordingly, schemas serve as knowledge structures that guide customer perception and drive behavioral responses, such as movement and motor activities (O'Reilly, 2012).…”