attention?

[Tom Givon]

Dear FUNK people,

At the risk of dragging you a bit far off center-filed, I would like to 
draw your attention to a recent paper in Proceedings of the Nat. Acad. 
Sci. (PNAS), co authored by two well-known exponents of Evolutionary 
Psychology, Leda Cosmides and J. Tooby of UC Santa Barbara (with a 
colleague, Joshua New). The title may be a bit off-putting to linguists: 
"Category-specific attention for animals reflects ancestral priorities, 
not expertise". Or, in other words, evolved genetics rather than 
acquired experience. This paper is another foray into finding a specific 
evolved "module" for any seemingly-universal behavioral trait of homo 
sapiens, rather than entertaining alternative explanations, such as 
module-sharing, distributed networks, etc. What drew my attention to 
this particular Cosmides/Tooby opus is that it encroaches on data 
linguists know well under various names, e.g. "the topicality 
hierarchy", or Haj Ross's "world order (CLS 1975).

Many neurologists have noted that higher cognitive faculties, such 
attention, lexicon, grammar etc., are represented in the brain by 
multi-modular distributive networks/circuits (Schneider and Chein 2003; 
Posner & Fan 2008; Friederici 2008; Bookheimer 2002; Hagoort 2008; Kaan 
2008; Dehaene and Cohen 2007). Within such circuits, the lower-level 
modules may not be specific to any particular task, but rather partake 
in many different circuits.What is task-specific is the circuit or network.

What Cosmides/Tooby suggested is that a special "attention to animates" 
module evolved in homo sapiens. But one could extend this "narrow 
modularity" ad absurdum, assigning special attention modules to all the 
"umarked"/"salient" members of the well-known pairs linguists (and 
psychologists) have been talking about for years:
                            SALIENT   LESS-SALIENT
                           ========   =============
                            human    >  non-human
                            animate   >  inanimate
                            moving   >  stationary
                            compact  >  diffuse
                            near        >  far
                            ego-related  >  ego-unrelated
                            (1st > 2nd >  3rd person)
                            concrete     >  abstract
                            colorful      >  dull/murky
                            event   >   non-event
                            figure   >   ground
                            etc.
All other things being equal, humans are more likely to pay more 
attention to the salient than to the less- salient member of these 
contrasting pairs.  But to account for this, one need not invent 
multiple attention "modules". Rather, one can note that default 
saliency-coding--in lexical-semantic memory--is probably the  real 
mechanism  to be explained by the evolutionary psychologist. Attention, 
on the other hand, probably remains a (relatively) general-purpose 
mechanism.

Cheers,  TG