Attention is a sterile concept; iterative reentry is a fertile substitute

Attention has been defined as a filter, a limited resource, a spotlight, a zoom lens, and even as a glue that binds disconnected visual features into a coherent object. Here, I claim that all of these metaphor-based explanations are circular. As such, they fail to provide adequate accounts of the phenomena they are purported to explain. In contrast, those very phenomena can be explained on the idea that perceptions emerge from iterative exchanges between cortical regions linked by two-way pathways. Processing can occur in one of two modes: feed-forward and reentrant. In feed-forward mode, the system is configured optimally for the expected input, and perception occurs on the feed-forward sweep. This form of processing corresponds to what is commonly referred to as “preattentive”. If the system cannot be configured appropriately, perceptions emerge from iterative reentrant processing, which is slower, and corresponds to what is commonly referred to as “attentive”.