Essays on attention and creative thought

Abstract

In the mental life of an ordinary person, creative thoughts, as well as other non-rigid forms of thought, such as mind wandering, are both pervasive and important for our cognitive endeavors. The goal of my dissertation is to provide a theory of these non-rigid forms of thought by understanding some of the cognitive mechanisms that underlie them, as well as to understand how these underlying mechanisms contribute to our epistemic lives more generally in all kinds of reasoning. Chapter 1 (based on co-authored work with Azenet Lopez) begins with a puzzle that arises from research on mind wandering: since during mind wandering we plausibly prioritize the information relevant to the concurrent tasks less, why does mind wandering sometimes improve rather than impair concurrent task performance? I resolve the puzzle by rejecting the standard conception of attention, according to which the more focused one’s attention is, the better it is at improving task performance. I instead argue that certain tasks are better performed with a more diffuse rather than focused mode of attention. I offer a conception of "diffuse attention" that generalizes from external to internal forms of attention and conceptualize mind wandering as an instance of it. Chapter 2 turns to provide an account of creative thinking, which is closely related to mind wandering. I argue that previous accounts in philosophy about the generation of creative thought are incomplete due to overlooking the role of what I call “memory gists”. Memory gists are memory contents that represent more abstract or qualitative features that are extracted from the specific, surface level features in the memory representations that were initially encoded in memory. I argue that generating and using memory gists in memory search enables highly creative people to form connections between memory contents that are not usually associated with each other by revealing their commonalities shared in their gists. Moreover, I argue that different mechanisms underlie online and offline generation of memory gists: the former involves the mode of diffuse attention that I conceptualized in Chapter 1, while the latter involves memory consolidation during sleep or wakeful rests. The active role that memory plays in creative thinking raises some questions about how to conceptualize the function of memory in our epistemic lives more generally. I explore this topic further in Chapter 3, where I reject the traditional view in epistemology that memory merely functions to preserve previously acquired information, such as information acquired through perception. I argue instead that one of the functions of memory is to improve our understanding of what was represented in the contents that we previously acquired. This is possible thanks to the fact that during memory consolidation, our memory system further processes previously acquired information, and generates representations about relationships between different components of the subject under consideration. My work thus contributes to the ongoing project of understanding memory as an active process instead of merely performing the role of storing information, and highlights understanding as one of the epistemic values that memory generates.