Research has demonstrated that emotion modulates specificity in recollection of personally experienced events and the words individuals use during recollection reflect their psychological states. Here, we investigated the linguistic features of autobiographical memory (AM) of different specificity for different emotional events to address how emotion would modulate the psychological mechanisms underlying AM of different specificity. We analyzed 122 participants’ narratives of AM categorized as specific and general under happy, sad, angry, fearful and neutral cues. The use of three groups (emotional process, cognitive process and thinking style) of words was, respectively, compared between specific and general AM in each emotion condition. In retrieval of sad, angry and fearful events, general relative to specific AM contained more affective process words, notably negative words. General AM featured more cognitive process words than specific AM, regardless of emotion type (except neutral). When recalling happy events, general AM featured more analytic thinking words than specific AM, while in recollection of fearful events, general AM featured fewer such words than specific AM. General relative to specific AM about happy experiences contained more narrative thinking words. These findings suggest that the psychological mechanisms underlying top-down and bottom-up retrieval differ between particular types of emotion engaged in AM.

This commentary refutes Rosenholtz’s claim that visual attention lacks conceptual validity. We contend that attention remains important for elucidating capacity-limited perceptual processing and explaining phenomenological experience. Alternative frameworks centered on tasks and decision boundaries fail to account for perceptual effects that attentional mechanisms can capture. Thus, preserving attention as a theoretical construct is important, providing interpretive frameworks for empirical investigations.

Rosenholtz addresses the crisis of proliferating mechanisms for visual attention by redefining the concept in terms of (a) the known limitations of peripheral vision and (b) a proper assessment of task complexity. We argue that abandoning the see → decide → act pipeline model and the myth of a centralized gate or resource eliminates this crisis. In our view, “attention” describes an outcome—the consequence of multiple constraints on perception and action—rather than a reified cause.

Paradigm shifts as advocated by Kuhn (1962), should be rarely occurring and based upon true crises. The study of attention, however, is not in crisis requiring a paradigm shift but instead has a firm empirical foundation that can accommodate the findings in visual search cited in the target article.

Rosenholtz’s paper is a solid addition to a long tradition of throwing out babies with attentional bathwater (Di Lollo, 2012) (Wolfe, 2012) (Hulleman & Olivers, 2017) (Wolfe, 2017). She is correct that the term “attention” has been used in profligate and often ill-defined ways. That said, I argue that any plausible model of visual search must include visual selective attention.

Recent electrophysiological studies of visual attention have highlighted the importance of visual circuits through evolutionarily conserved brain regions in the midbrain that target processing stages downstream from early visual cortex. These findings support the target article’s emphasis on late-stage “task selection” but are also consistent with early-stage modulation of basic visual features and flexible pooling of visual signals.

Rosenholtz argues that summary statistics explain attentional phenomena via peripheral vision. While we acknowledge their role, we challenge the claim that they serve as an alternative mechanism. Instead, we argue that summary statistics and selective attention are interdependent, shaping visual perception under limited capacity, as evidenced by perceptual biases in numerosity judgments and mean estimations of shape size, color, and position.

I agree that, in some literature, the term “attention” is ill-defined and the constraints of peripheral vision have been overlooked. However, I disagree with omitting the empirical studies that have emphasized the importance of defining, operationalizing, and manipulating different types of attention and have investigated their effects on perception as a function of eccentricity and polar angle in peripheral vision.

This study investigated L2 learners’ interpretation of quantifier scope, focusing on the influence of individual differences, including L2 proficiency, working memory (WM) and inhibitory control (IC). A picture selection task using the covered-box paradigm (CBP) was conducted with 70 Chinese-speaking learners of English and a control group of 40 native English speakers. The results revealed that inverse scope (IS) posed particular challenges for L2 learners, leading to reduced, non-target-like access. We attribute this difficulty to factors such as negative L1 transfer, limited L2 input and increased processing demands associated with IS compared to surface scope (SS). More importantly, WM and IC significantly influenced L2 learners’ interpretation patterns, with their effects mediated by L2 proficiency. We also observed individual variation in scope interpretations among native speakers, particularly with negatively quantified (NQ) sentences. This variation provides valuable evidence of individual differences in native speakers’ grammatical knowledge and was partly driven by cognitive factors. Altogether, the findings contribute novel evidence for both domain-general and domain-specific mechanisms underlying quantifier scope interpretation in L2 learners as well as in native speakers.

The commentaries debated numerous points in the target article. Many questioned the existence of a crisis and the benefits of a paradigm shift, even though none countered the listed signs of a crisis. Paradigm shifts are an important way that science progresses. There remains hope for a unifying theory, and for a reawakening of an ambitious science of visual attention.

Rosenholtz (2024) dismisses attentional capture, arguing that brief distractions (20–40 ms) are insignificant or intentional. However, we argue that distractions are never intentional nor negligible, and studying them is crucial both theoretically and for real-world applications.

How do our goals continually impact perceptual processing? The answer could arise from a computational specification of perception in terms of visual tasks, or perhaps several mechanisms operating over specific contexts. Here, we suggest an alternative: adaptive computation, a new algorithmic account of attention that rations the general resource of perceptual computations according to their impact on decision making.

Extensive research using the attentional blink phenomenon illustrates, through behavioural, modelling and cognitive neuroscience approaches, that distinct selection and attention capacity limits exist. Crucially, these effects cannot reflect peripheral visual processes nor distinct task operations across conditions controlling for issues raised by Rosenholtz. Moving away from attention and selection concepts hinder rather than facilitate a mechanistic understanding of vision.

Rosenholtz is right that the multiple meanings of attention hinder development of a unified attention theory, but this is not a crisis. Embracing its diversity can advance fields like clinical psychology. However, inattentional blindness challenges attempts to move beyond attention as an explanatory concept. I illustrate this by highlighting attentional set, which demonstrates selective prioritization rather than mere task constraints.

Visual Attention in Crisis provides the reader with an alternative way to think about the visual attention phenomena–often interpretable in terms of perceptual processes and peripheral vision. We urge an extension of these considerations to developmental science. Infancy research underpins the foundations of mature attentional mechanisms. It may offer a critical test for evolving perceptual limits on attention.

Processing sentences is modulated by the grammatical aspect of the predicate. Previous studies have indicated that the English progressive and Farsi imperfective are associated with a stronger mental activation of the components or circumstances of the situation, such as instruments or locations. This study deals with the processing of sentences in Russian, a language with a perfective vs. imperfective aspectual distinction. In a self-paced reading experiment with 48 respondents, sentences were presented with (mostly) atelic verbs in either imperfective or perfective aspects and locative adverbials that were typical or atypical for the situation. We expected atypical locatives to slow down reaction times and that this effect would be the strongest in imperfective contexts because of greater mental activation of the situation. Contrary to our expectations, the perfective aspect was associated with longer reaction times for atypical locative adverbials. We interpret this as an effect of the higher functional complexity of the Russian perfective, especially in the case of the perfectives of the (mostly) atelic verbs used in our experiment.

The field has chosen gate as its preferred metaphor for attention. This commentary will discuss the power and the consequences of this choice. It will make the case that a better metaphor is needed, to liberate our understanding of attention from the constraints imposed by the gate metaphor.

Understanding the limits of visual processing is at the core of understanding visual attention. Rosenholtz proposes task complexity as a potential solution to identify a putative unifying capacity limit. We argue that if task complexity is indeed used to identify a unifying limit, effort must crucially be incorporated to prevent a future crisis in the field of visual attention.

The similarities between 2D summary statistics and fragmentary 3D vision suggest common principles. Specifically, both 2D and 3D visual processing discard information whenever that information is redundant or inessential for ecologically valid vision in a consistent world. Change blindness and other illusions result from information loss without awareness, when the corresponding consistency assumptions are violated.

While I agree with Rosenholtz that attention as mechanism should often be “banned”—this conception is confused and often explanatorily useless—I suggest that the real crisis is the proliferation of different, too often underspecified, mechanisms as attention. Attention is not an explainer. It is what we are trying to explain. Confusion on this point leads to unnecessary theoretical disunity.