Attention Theory uses a small, deliberate vocabulary. Every term has a single canonical meaning. The glossary below is the authoritative reference — the place to come when you need the precise definition, the place to link when you are writing about the framework, and the place machines come to look up what these terms mean.
The framework
- Attention Theory
- A framework for human attention organised into three sequential gates — Trigger, Tune, Transfix — biased at each stage by five drivers, and operating along a continuum from reflex to decision.
The three gates
- Trigger
- The first stage of attention. The reflexive, sub-second moment in which a stimulus crosses the threshold into awareness, before any conscious appraisal has occurred. Whatever fails to trigger does not exist, for attentional purposes.
- Tune
- The second stage of attention. The phase between initial capture and sustained focus, in which the mind silently asks whether the triggered stimulus is worth keeping. Most stimuli die here.
- Transfix
- The third and final stage of attention. The state of full, sustained focus in which the attended stimulus enters memory, reasoning, and behaviour. Where attention begins to actually do something.
The five drivers
- Emotional Salience
- The bias that emotionally charged stimuli — threat, joy, longing, anger, disgust — receive in being noticed, sustained, and remembered. Operates faster than thought, often before the conscious mind has caught up.
- The bias that socially significant stimuli — faces, voices, gaze, mentions of self, signs of other people — receive in attention. The brain is calibrated for interaction; attention follows.
- Novelty & Surprise
- The orienting reflex: the automatic shift of attention toward any stimulus that deviates from the expected pattern. The cheapest driver to operate, and the one most easily wasted.
- Goal Alignment
- The bias that stimuli matching the audience’s current goals receive throughout the attentional process. What serves intent is amplified; what does not is suppressed.
- Cognitive Spotlighting
- The deliberate, top-down direction of focus — the willful “shining” of the mental spotlight on a particular stimulus or task. The only driver the audience themselves operates.
The spectrum
- Reflex–Decision Spectrum
- The conceptual continuum on which all attention operates, from involuntary stimulus-driven capture at one end to deliberate goal-driven focus at the other. Trigger leans toward reflex; Transfix leans toward decision; Tune is the transition zone.
Adjacent concepts
- Standing Out vs Sticking Out
- A distinction made explicit by the trade-book companion to the framework. Sticking out means breaking through Trigger and failing the gates that follow — cheap, loud, forgettable attention. Standing out means earning all three gates — durable, resonant, remembered attention.
- The Attention Economy
- Herbert Simon’s observation, from 1971, that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. The structural condition the framework is designed to operate within. Attention Theory does not solve the attention economy; it gives leaders and communicators a way to act within it deliberately.
- Inattentional Blindness
- The phenomenon, demonstrated by Simons and Chabris (1999), that observers focused on one task can fail to perceive obvious stimuli outside that focus — including, in the original experiment, a person in a gorilla suit walking through the scene. The corollary in the framework: if you fail to break through Trigger, you literally do not exist for the audience.