The white paper is the document that began Attention Theory. It is a meta-theoretical synthesis: not original empirical research, not a new neurological discovery, but an attempt to integrate decades of established attention research across cognitive psychology, neuroscience, behavioural science, and communication theory into a single, usable framework.
Its argument is that the answer to “how does attention work” is already in the literature. It has simply never been assembled in a form that a practitioner can pick up and apply.
What the paper does
The paper proposes the Trigger–Tune–Transfix model, a three-gate description of how attention moves from initial capture to sustained focus, and a set of five drivers — Emotional Salience, Social Relevance, Novelty & Surprise, Goal Alignment, and Cognitive Spotlighting — that bias the passage through each gate. It introduces the reflex–decision spectrum as a corrective to the classical bottom-up / top-down dichotomy, arguing that real attention does not split into two categories but moves along a continuum.
It applies the framework to two practical domains in detail: marketing and education. It closes with a frank limitations section, acknowledging that the model has not yet been tested empirically as a unified construct, does not yet account for individual differences, and would benefit from cross-disciplinary collaboration in future research.
The underlying scholarship
The synthesis draws on, among others:
- Michael Posner and the attention system of the human brain — the orienting, alerting, and executive networks.
- Daniel Kahneman and the capacity model of attention — attention as a finite resource.
- Joseph LeDoux on the emotional brain — the “low road” from sensory input to amygdala.
- Antonio Damasio on the somatic marker hypothesis — emotion as a bias on decision.
- Simon Baron-Cohen on theory of mind and social attention.
- Laurent Itti & Christof Koch on computational saliency mapping.
- Robert Desimone & John Duncan on biased competition in visual attention.
- William James on the founding definition of attention as selection.
- Donald Broadbent and Anne Treisman on the filter and attenuation models.
- Evgeny Sokolov on the orienting reflex and habituation.
- Patrick Vuilleumier and colleagues on emotion and attention in the brain.
Read the paper
The PDF is being prepared for release. To request a draft in the meantime, write to gary@theoryofattention.com.
If you would rather read the framework directly
The site you are on is the framework in its working form. If you do not need the citations, you do not need the paper.
- The Framework — overview.
- Trigger, Tune, Transfix — the three gates.
- The five drivers.
- The reflex–decision spectrum.