attention?

[Tom Givon]

Thanks, Keith. I'm glad there's the beginning of a debate. Let's just 
make sure that this NOT about genetic determination, nor about 
modularity, nor about innateness. If we accept evolution, we have to 
accept that in principle those things exist. Otherwise each of us will 
have to start from scratch, from the amoeba, which is obviously a 
colossal waste of the zillions of years of adaptive experimentation by 
all those previous generations of protozoa, coelenterates, mollusks and 
vertebrates. So the question is more factual--WHAT is modular? WHAT is 
genetically determined? WHAT is innate?

T/C have the unfortunate tendency to over-reach with claims of  narrow 
modularity, discounting the role of general-purpose mechanisms such as 
memory & attention. These are, by the way, evolved & genetically 
determined too. In this particular case, they want to micro-modularize 
attention. What I hoped to point out is:
(i) that if they do it for animacy, they'll have to do it for 
concreteness, compactness, motion, singularity, ego, etc., since all the 
language data suggest that these are the more salient or "marked" 
categories, and the attentional lit. suggests that animate brains pay 
more attention to salient entities. (This is not really a human-specific 
genetic trait, but an ANMIMATE trait. If T/C had experimented with rats, 
they would have found exactly the same facts. Tho I think Skinner must 
have already done that).
(ii) That there probably is a better module where the genetics of 
salient categories already is expressed, perm,anent semantic memory (for 
humans, the lexicon). So at the very least, T/C will have to argue why 
the modularity is in the attentional system rather than in semantic memory.
And (iii) that there are several teams that have been working for a long 
time on the neurology of attention (e.g. Schneider and Chein 2003; 
Posner & Fan 2008). It is curious that T/C don't bother to look at the 
highly specific results these team have reported about the 
distributive-network(s) neurology of attention, just to see if their 
micro-modularity claims are compatible with what is known about the 
neurology of attention.

Cheers,  TG

=============


Keith Johnson wrote:
> Thanks Tom for pointing out the PNAS article.
>
> Of course, the physical structure of the brain is to some extent 
> determined by evolved genetics and not acquired experience, so it 
> makes sense to wonder if some of this structure underlies any unique 
> function.
>
> Your slippery slope argument about proliferating modules ad absurdum 
> doesn't really convince me to to reject the paper.  The data have to 
> be evaluated on their merits - otherwise we're evaluating research on 
> the basis of the outcome not on the validity of the process.
>
> So, I look forward to reading the Cosmides, Tooby & New paper.
>
> best,
> Keith
>