Bruya Brian, Tang Yi-Yuan
Department of History and Philosophy, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, MI, United States.
Department of Psychological Sciences, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, United States.
Front Psychol. 2021 Sep 28;12:704443. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.704443. eCollection 2021.
Attention is indispensable to our learning, performance, relationships, health, and daily life, and yet laboratory studies of attention have only scratched the surface of these lived varieties of attention. In this article, we begin with William James' theory of derived involuntary attention, which has largely been ignored in laboratory research. We then show that there is a gap in our attention vocabulary and the theory that underpins it, which depend on an incomplete voluntary/involuntary dichotomy. The negative effects of this dichotomy stretch beyond laboratory research to clinical diagnosis, influencing how we understand so-called attention deficits. To fill the gap between voluntary and involuntary, we introduce a third kind of attention-fluid attention (also called postvoluntary attention), which is goal-directed and selective, like voluntary attention, but also effortless and drawn to its source, like involuntary attention. Fluid attention is a rediscovery of James' derived involuntary attention. A distinguishing feature of fluid attention is its motivational component, which, we show, neurophysiologically also reveals a gap in the neurocognitive literature on attention. Recognizing fluid attention as fundamentally motivational allows ADHD to be redefined as a motivational rather than an attentional deficit, which we go on to show has significant implications for both special and regular education.
注意力对于我们的学习、表现、人际关系、健康和日常生活来说不可或缺，然而，关于注意力的实验室研究仅仅触及了这些实际生活中注意力类型的表面。在本文中，我们首先从威廉·詹姆斯的派生非自愿注意理论开始，该理论在实验室研究中很大程度上被忽视了。然后我们指出，我们的注意力词汇及其背后的理论存在一个缺口，这一缺口依赖于不完整的自愿/非自愿二分法。这种二分法的负面影响不仅延伸到实验室研究，还影响到临床诊断，影响我们对所谓注意力缺陷的理解。为了填补自愿和非自愿之间的缺口，我们引入了第三种注意力——流体注意力（也称为后自愿注意），它像自愿注意一样是目标导向和选择性的，但又像非自愿注意一样无需努力且被其来源所吸引。流体注意力是对詹姆斯派生非自愿注意的重新发现。流体注意力的一个显著特征是其动机成分，我们表明，从神经生理学角度来看，这在关于注意力的神经认知文献中也揭示了一个缺口。将流体注意力视为根本上具有动机性，使得注意力缺陷多动障碍（ADHD）能够被重新定义为一种动机缺陷而非注意力缺陷，我们接着表明这对特殊教育和普通教育都具有重大意义。
