Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The study of attention faces significant conceptual ambiguities rooted in persistent reductive and anthropocentric assumptions. To address this, we advocate for a non-reductive, biogenic framework, reconceptualizing attention as an embodied, evolutionarily conserved process essential for maintaining thermodynamic equilibrium. We operationalize this perspective using Active Inference, defining attention as the selective allocation of precision (gain) to prediction errors. This mechanism tunes the organism's sensitivity to salient information, serving to minimize variational free energy (uncertainty). Precision modulation offers a compelling interpretation of selective spatial attention across psychology and neuroscience while aligning with established philosophical theories. Ultimately, this biogenic, predictive account may provide the necessary formalisms to resolve current conceptual impasses and invigorate the understanding of attention within the context of embodied cognition.