Recent years have seen a renewed interest in the study of attention, particularly in empirical, human, and educational sciences (Tsuchiya and van Boxtel 2013; Carrasco 2011). A survey of the main works published in this field in the last twenty years shows that a general and systematic conceptual framework for investigating attention is still required (for this claim in psychological research, see Styles 2006, in neurosciences Posner 2011).

In this article, I aim to provide such a theoretical framework for some of the aspects of our lived experience usually addressed by the concept of attention. ‘Attention’ is an umbrella-term encompassing many different mechanisms and phenomena. In what follows, I will focus on a particular class of attentional experiences, namely perceptual attentional experiences, rather than others such as moral or ethical attention to the needs of another person. More precisely, referring to the classification recently proposed by Watzl (2011a, b), I will concentrate my analysis on the question of how attention shapes the phenomenological character of experience, in contrast to its role in consciousness or theory of action. I wish to show – and this is my main claim – that perceptual attentional experiences are necessarily embodied.

In our everyday experience, we tend to think of attention as a kind of spotlight – that is, as a flash of light illuminating particular things around us. However, current neuroscientific and psychological research, as well as philosophical reflection, has shown the metaphor of the spotlight to have some crucial flaws. In particular, recent work in empirical (psychological and neuroscientific, as well as educational) research has raised the claim that attention is deeply related to movements of bodily organs and to the various positions the human body can assume in situations in which attention is required. Although those claims are still widely discussed and although there is no consensus about the findings, I will discuss them in the following insofar as they can say something about the phenomenology of attention. Mostly, I am concerned with one consequence of those empirical claims: the idea of attention as a mental spotlight seems to be called into question. They point the way towards a more adequate conceptualization of the phenomenology of attentional experience as inherently embodied. Therefore, I will not be able to go into a detailed review of the experiments. Instead, I will focus on the consequences at the philosophical and phenomenological level.

Phenomenology of attentionFootnote 1 is a theoretical enterprise that, taking up results from empirical sciences, describes attention in the everyday context of personal lived experience (for the relation between phenomenology and cognitive sciences on attention see Arvidson 2003). Against classical theories of attention, and even against our naive understanding of this phenomenon in folk psychology, I will argue that attention in our own lived experience is not some kind of ‘spotlight’ or an eminently ‘mental activity’ we direct to surrounding things or events, but that it is embodied.Footnote 2 Secondary attention as a purely mental activity is based on a more fundamental layer which is essentially embodied. In order to show this, I will proceed in the following steps: (1.) I will analyse the metaphor of the spotlight and recapitulate how Merleau-Ponty deals with it, dismissing it as untenable (in The Phenomenology of Perception: Merleau-Ponty 2002) because of his critique of what he calls “constancy presupposition”. Unfortunately, Merleau-Ponty is mostly concerned with a critique of classical theories of attention and does not formulate a new, positive approach. Therefore, in the second part (2.) I will take up an example in order to argue for the claim that a concept of embodied attention is needed. The concept of embodied attention I will argue for goes beyond Merleau-Ponty’s purely critical approach and stresses the connection of primary attention with embodiment, an aspect not itself present in The Phenomenology of Perception. After that, I will spell out three characteristics of this concept and make claims for what I call the transcendentalism of embodiment for attention, the bodily subjectivity of attention, and the creativity of embodied attention. Here I will consider classical literature on embodied cognition as well as new findings in empirical psychology, in order to make a stronger case in favour of these basic mechanisms of embodied attention. In the last part of this article (3.) I will summarize the results and point to further developments.

1 Critique of the spotlight model

In order to understand the spotlight model, let us take as an example the experience of listening intently to a scientific talk. This is often represented as focusing on the speaker, not being distracted by surrounding sounds, and as directing, in an intellectual way, the ‘ray’ of hearing and seeing departing from the head (or some point within our ears) toward the speaker. According to folk psychology, we are sometimes attentive to a particular event or to a particular thing or person, while at other times we are ‘distracted’ and pay no attention at all to what is going on. By this view, attention is an intellectual capacity we have at our disposal, which we can actively and voluntarily direct toward objects, events, and people in the surrounding world. In our example of attending a scientific conference, we can consciously decide when, if, and to what extent we want to pay attention to the talk. According to this model, attention is ‘directed’ toward something and brings it into focus, illuminating it more strongly than the surrounding objects, which remain in the shadows.

We can identify some crucial aspects of the spotlight model just described. Firstly (a.), since things not overtly attended to still exist (they are ‘in the dark’), their existence is independent from the experiencer. Secondly (b.), the difference between perception and attention is supposed to be purely quantitative, not qualitative: attended objects are just illuminated more strongly. Finally (c.), attention seems to be – according to this model – a purely cognitive act.

Indeed, the spotlight metaphor is given not only by common sense, but also by early descriptions of the phenomenology of experience. Edmund Husserl seems deeply indebted to this classical understanding of attention, at least in his earlier works (Husserl 1982, 2005; on this see most notably Jacobs 2016), whereas Maurice Merleau-Ponty gives a strong critique of this approach. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty’s main contribution to the development of a theory of attention consists precisely in this critique of the spotlight model, found in the third chapter of his Phenomenology of Perception. Let us consider the first two aspects of the model and spell out their criticism in detail; criticism of the third aspect will be developed by arguing for the necessity of a concept of embodied (as opposed to purely cognitive) attention.

  1. a).

    According to the metaphor of the spotlight, which is based upon empiricism, objects must be already ‘there’ and must be already constituted as things for my gaze to move towards them and bring them into focus (this is what Merleau-Ponty calls the “presupposition of constancy”). The following passage brings this point out:

They [i.e. the external objects] must then be unperceived, and the function which reveals them, as a searchlight shows up objects pre-existing in the darkness, is called attention. Attention, then, creates nothing […]. The searchlight’s beam is the same whatever landscape be illuminated. Attention is therefore a general and unconditioned power in the sense that at any moment it can be applied indifferently to any content of consciousness. […] Understood in this sense, attention does not exist (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 34).

According to the spotlight model, objects and events must be ‘out there’, always-already completely constituted even when no one is paying them any attention. The ‘constancy presupposition’ argues that the world out there is simply constant and does not change its shape and meaning according to whether I pay attention to it or not.

From a phenomenological point of view, then, the theory of attention as a spotlight suffers from a major shortcoming: it presupposes that an always-already fully constituted external world impinges on the subject’s sense via stimuli or sense-data, which is something we do not have any actual experience of. This maybe a fair presupposition for the metaphysics and physiology of attention, but not for its phenomenology: following the Gestalt psychology of his time, for Merleau-Ponty sense-data are only to be described abstractly, and our experience cannot be reduced to a simple aggregation of stimuli.

  1. b).

    The idea that our experience is modified by attention only in quantity, not in quality, is untenable from the phenomenological point of view, since the content of our experience changes radically depending on whether I pay attention to the scene or not. For example, between one scenario in which I pay no attention to an ongoing scientific talk, and one in which I listen attentively, there is a qualitative difference in the content of my experience: indeed, the scientific talk only makes sense to me if I am able to pay at least some minimal amount of attention to it. In other words, the meaning of the talk becomes apparent to me only through some degree of attentive listening. Therefore, Merleau-Ponty can argue that attention actively constitutes the form (Gestalt) of my experience by making it meaningful; that is, by bringing its meaning into focus. Attention, in Merleau-Ponty’s view, creates the object in its experienced meaning.Footnote 3

  2. c).

    If we follow Merleau-Ponty in claiming this, we cannot describe attention as a purely mental function which works in exactly the same way and is always equally powerful at each moment in time, simply illuminating what is always already there. This criticism is supported by considering concrete experiences, which we will do in the next section.

2 Embodied attention

I will carve out the example of our everyday experiences of attending to a lecture in order to show that it contradicts the third thesis of the spotlight model, according to which attention is a purely intellectual ability that is always identical in every attentional act. Stressing the role of the body (which is not necessarily completely negated, but surely marginalized by the spotlight model) and the way in which it modifies attention, we can avoid all three problems spelled out in the last section.

In order to do this, I will describe, along this example, three bodily conditions that need to be met in order to be attentive: a certain posture of the body; the satisfaction of primary needs; and habitualized movements.

Let us stick therefore with the experience of listening attentively to a scientific talk at a conference. It is possible that I try very hard, yet fail to understand a talk; I may catch only the gist of the presentation; or I may understand the entirety of the talk in all its complexity. Between these three possibilities, there is an infinite series of possible gradations in our concrete experience, and at any possible level of attention, the body seems to play a pivotal role. First of all, it is necessary (and not at all trivial) to notice that listening with attention to a scientific talk while standing impairs – at least to a certain extent – our capacity to focus.Footnote 4 While it is certainly possible to understand a talk while standing, we tend to be distracted by our own body (switching the leg we put most of our weight on, for example). But we do not only try to avoid standing in order to understand the talk: even while sitting, we look for the right position of our legs and arms, the right posture of our back. Indeed, the posture of our body is crucial in determining our ability to really pay attention to something. In all these cases, we try to find a posture in which we do not have to think about the body any more; the body functions in such a way that we do not have to pay attention to it, allowing us to direct our attention toward something else that occupies us.

Secondly, many bodily needs must have been met for me to pay proper attention: I must have slept well and eaten something (but not too much), the room temperature and my clothing must be comfortable, and so on. Such bodily needs tend to distract us to a more-or-less acute extent, while paying attention to something that interests us tend to make these needs less noticeable. A particularly well-known case is bodily pain. Suppose my knee hurts after a long run. The pain could make it impossible for me to concentrate on a very important but thoroughly boring scientific talk; we need to forget about the body in order to pay attention. Conversely, a highly interesting talk can distract us from pain and even alleviate it for a period of time. Also in this case, therefore, attention is linked to the necessity for the body to work properly and go unnoticed.

Thirdly and finally, we tend to accompany attentive listening with more or less conscious bodily and heavily habitualized movements. Taking notes in a notebook does not impair my attention but often boosts it; doodling (drawing circles or other figures on a piece of paper - think of what we do during a telephone conversation) or tapping our fingers on the table or our feet on the ground – these are only some of the habitualized bodily mechanisms we deploy while trying (sometimes very hard) to pay attention to a talk. We might think that such activities actual distract us from the task, but this is not the case, as shown in a series of studies, for example concerning doodling (Andrade 2010).

In all three circumstances, my claim is that the body is necessary for attentive experience: I will call the claim that this condition is necessary for every kind of attentional experience the transcendentalism of embodied attention. But the body as such a condition of possibility is not itself the focus of attention: indeed, it needs to slip into the background; i.e. it must cease to be an object of our attention, in order to become the subject of attention itself. I will call this the bodily subjectivity of attention. Phenomenologically, the body as a transcendental condition of experience must slip into the background in order to make attention directed to outer objects possible. This does not mean that the body is entirely outside the scope of the subject’s attention, but only that the body is not the main focus and becomes itself the subject of the attentive experience. By this, embodied attention shapes the meaning of our experience in new ways, for example by making it possible for the subject to grasp the meaning of the conference or to experience the content of a novel while reading it (this is the claim of the creativity of embodied attention).

2.1 The transcendentalism of embodied attention

Despite the lack of a systematic theory of embodied attention and of its phenomenology, the concept of embodied attention has already found some application in empirical research, giving a solid empirical basis to the claim that attention is based transcendentally on embodiment. Empirical research has been mostly developed in connection with action-based mechanisms of attention (for an early review of research see Tipper et al. 1998). More recently, Yu and Smith (2012) have shown that forms of attention linked to action (they do speak themselves of ‘embodied attention’) are crucial in triggering word-learning in toddlers: toddlers solve the problem of focusing attention by bringing the object, through movement, closer to themselves (see also Smith et al. 2007). By doing this and uttering words out loud they are able to associate words with a particular, concrete meaning.

The link between attention and the body is most striking in everyday settings. Here, visual attention does imply movement (Hayhoe and Ballard 2005). Eye movements (Grosbras et al. 2005), head movements (Duhamel et al. 1992), and hand movements (Thura et al. 2008) have been shown to influence attention: getting closer or further away, the positions of hands, head, and limbs, as well as body-posture, all change the attentional relation to objects or events. As an example, the movements of the hands and their relative positions have been shown to influence results in an attentionally demanding letter-discrimination task: the performance of discriminating between letters on a screen improved significantly when the right hand was moving towards the screen. The authors of the study conclude that, “static and dynamic features of both hands combine in modulating pragmatic maps of attention.” (Festman et al. 2013) Moreover, interacting with an object with the right or left hand has been shown to change the allocation of attention (Deubel and Schneider 2005).

From a neurological point of view, motor-planning brain regions have been shown to play a role in attention (Moore and Armstrong 2003; Armstrong and Moore 2007; Hagler et al. 2007; Kelley et al. 2008; Knudsen 2007) and in its turn, attention influences sensorimotor brain areas (Rosenkranz and Rothwell 2004) as well as sensorimotor integration (Velasques et al. 2013). In 2003 Armstrong, Moore and Fallah argued for a reciprocal interaction, at the level of neural circuits, between spatial fixation of attention and correlative bodily movements (Armstrong et al. 2003).

These findings have mostly gone unaccounted for in theoretical research on embodied cognition, with only a few notable exceptions. To my knowledge, the concept of embodied attention has played almost no role in phenomenological and embodied cognition research up to now.

On the other hand, from a philosophical point of view the concept of ‘bodily attention’ has been discussed by Wehrle and Breyer (2016). This concept has the potential to account for these findings on a theoretical level; but their inquiry actually focuses on particular forms of attentive experience and behaviour in which the body clearly plays a prominent role, such as in football, dancing, theatre and similar activities. Although they do note that the body is always already operative in our experience, their concept of ‘bodily attention’ designates a particular kind of attentional experience, and not an essential aspect that conditions the possibility of attentional experience as such. “Bodily attention” is a feature of certain, very specific experiences in our daily life, in which the activity the subject is carrying out is mostly motoric and requires therefore attention especially directed at bodily movements. In contrast to this approach, by arguing for the concept of embodied attention I wish to make clear that this paper is not looking at just an aspect or a particular kind of attentional experience, nor at an attention directed to the body: we are aiming at describe the necessary anchoring in the body of attentional experience as such. While Wehrle and Breyer focus on particular attentional experiences in which the body plays an obviously pivotal role and is therefore attended to, the embodiment of attention is an essential aspect of every attentional experience.

In a similar vein, NoëFootnote 5 and O’Regan have claimed that attention has to be understood in the framework of a sensorimotor theory of perception (O'Regan and Noë 2001), but do not go any deeper into this claim.Footnote 6 They do not focus on the relationship between bodily movements and attention, but rather on the claim that “seeing without movements is, under the theory, a subspecies of seeing: an exception.” Indeed, according to them “seeing involves testing the changes that occur through eye, body, and attention movements.” (O'Regan and Noë 2001, p. 947) Similarly, Hanna and Maiese claim (although only en passant) that “attention or inattention” is something that “the egocentrically-centered subject does” (Hanna and Maiese 2009, 96) without explaining further the action component (“doing”) of this claim or its relation to embodiment. The idea of embodied attention is indebted to such approaches and aims to spell them out further by elucidating more precisely the role of the body and of action in attention and by arguing for a primary layer of attention which plays a transcendental role.

Despite these hints, a comprehensive theory of embodied attention is still lacking. Rizzolatti, Riggio, Dascola and Umiltà proposed, as early as 1987, the idea of a “premotor theory of attention”, which has remained largely unexplored from the philosophical point of view. According to Rizzolatti and colleagues, attention is always linked to the triggering of saccadic eye movements – even when these are impaired by external (such as experimental) conditions. Since attention is not the movement itself, but its trigger, they call this theory ‘premotor theory’. According to them, attention triggers a saccadic eye movement under every experimental circumstance, and even if the actual movement is impaired through experimental conditions the general dependence of attention on saccadic eye movements remains crucial. More recently Rizzolatti has taken up this theory again together with Craighero (Craighero and Rizzolatti 2005) by claiming that “the premotor attentional mechanism appears [...] to be a general mechanism valid for attention in space […] as well as for attention to objects.” (Craighero and Rizzolatti 2005, 186) According to their account, attention is strongly linked to bodily movementsFootnote 7 and is not volitional, since it happens mostly when the subject is attracted by something in her or his environment, without necessarily being consciously directed to that object or point in space.

This account has been further sustained by one recent attempt to revive Craighero and Rizzolatti’s embodied approach to attention. In 2015, Abrams and Weidler surveyed recent empirical findings, mostly obtained by Abrams himself and his colleagues, that show how stimuli are elaborated in a way that is quantitatively and qualitatively different when they are close to the hands of the subject. Therefore, according to them, it is reasonable to claim that attention strongly depends upon movements of the exploratory organs (in their case, the hands). Moreover, they showed that the position of the body (e.g. standing) influences attention in a similar way (Abrams and Weidler 2015). The theoretical framework invoked by the authors refers to Gibson’s concept of ‘affordance’: an object offers possibilities for action if near the hand, and this influences attentional mechanisms. Recently, empirical findings have shown that at least some levels of attention are bodily skills and can therefore be learned through practice (Clark et al. 2015).

Unfortunately, neither Merleau-Ponty’s critique nor these findings have been taken up in the philosophy of embodied cognition.Footnote 8 Here, we seem to have a very classical understanding of attention. For example, Lakoff and Johnson in their Philosophy in the Flesh describe directing attention only in terms of ‘pointing’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 238) and think of paying attention as ‘looking at’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 238). Varela, Thompson and Rosch, in their seminal The Embodied Mind (first published in 1991 and re-issued in 2017), endorse the classical view: “Attention, an [...] omnipresent mental factor, arises in interaction with intention. Intention directs consciousness and the other mental factors toward some general area, at which point attention moves them toward specific features. Attention focuses and holds consciousness on some object” (Varela et al. 2017, 126; my emphasis). This theory sees attention as a generalized, omnipresent and purely mental factor that focuses on something already existing; it is of such a theory that Merleau-Ponty is speaking when he argues, as in the quotation above, that such an attention simply “does not exist.”

2.2 The bodily subjectivity of attention

On the other hand, what we get in classical approaches to embodied cognition are usually very strong considerations about bodily self-awareness (for example in S. Gallagher’s milestone work, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2006). But this is precisely not what I mean by embodied attention; bodily self-awareness and embodied attention are two kinds of intentionality that rely on completely different phenomenological structures.Footnote 9 The most striking difference is that bodily self-awareness is not object perception (see also Gallagher 2003). In contrast, in the phenomenon of embodied attention, we are confronted with the directedness of our own body towards an object that is external to us: the football field, the scientific talk or the book I am currently reading, to stick with our previous examples. For this to be possible, my body must be the subject of my attention and needs to stay in the background; in embodied attention I am mostly unaware of and unattentive to my body. In bodily self-awareness I am attentive to (or unattentionally aware of) my own body; in embodied attention my own body is attentive to its surroundings. The lines of force and the field structures created by an attentional football player with her or his own body are not themselves part of the body – they are ‘out there’, on the field; they only start at the body.

If this distinction between embodied attention and bodily self-awareness is correct, we can claim that the primary layer of attention is not a spotlight or an intellectual capacity, or a relation between myself and my body proper, but a way of shaping the experiential field in accordance with the movements – and the possibilities for movement – of the human body.Footnote 10

Although his analysis of attention is focused on critiquing the spotlight-model, and although – as stated at the start of this paper – he does no focus on the link between attention and the body, Merleau-Ponty’s own phenomenology gives some hints that can be useful in describing this complexity inherent to our attentional experiences and attitudes. Merleau-Ponty claims that we have to distinguish between a primary and a secondary attention. Secondary attention is an act of the will undertaken by the subject who, under certain circumstances, can direct her or his gaze toward a particular event, object or person. Secondary attention is therefore a conscious and deliberative engagement with something in the world. But, in Merleau-Ponty’s opinion, this is only possible on the basis of a previous attentive disposition that opens up the possibility of explicitly directing our gaze towards what is of interest. Merleau-Ponty calls this ‘primary attention’. Primary attention opens up the horizon in which we can experience something as a structured experience of a Gestalt. This primary attention mostly works in a passive fashion:

The first operation of attention is, then, to create for itself a field, either perceptual or mental, which can be ‘surveyed’ (überschauen), in which movements of the exploratory organ or elaborations of thought are possible, but in which consciousness does not correspondingly lose what it has gained and, moreover, lose itself in the changes it brings about (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 34).

According to this, we can say that primary attention is an experience in which the body plays the role of the subject. The body as subject actively shapes the field of perceptual experience according to its position in space and to the relative position of objects. But how does the body shapes this field and the objects within it?

2.2.1 The creativity of attention

Here, we come closer to the positive construction of a theory of creative attention attention. Attention in its ‘first operation’ is theorized as opening up a field that is not entirely known in its singular features, but that can more generally be surveyed by movements of our exploratory organs. This act of ‘surveying’ is further determined in the following way: in understanding attention as a spotlight (a metaphor that could still be used in speaking of secondary attention, but not primary attention), the focus of the subject on something implies, at the same time, the exclusion of what is not focused on. In other words, we are often not aware of what is happening around us if we are deeply involved in, for example, solving a particularly difficult theoretical problem, such as a mathematical equation. In primary, bodily attention, we do not have this kind of focus and correlative exclusion, but only an opening up of possibilities for bodily movements. In this way Merleau-Ponty can argue – as in our last quote – that consciousness does not lose what it has gained. At this point it must be stressed that conceiving of a primary attention not in terms of focusing and exclusion, but as an opening up of a field of possibilities, does not mean conflating this level of attention with perception (taken here to be the more general concept of which attention is just an aspect). Indeed – as will become clear in what follows – an attentive perceptual experience can be differentiated from an inattentive one precisely through the amplitude of the new possibilities discovered by attention. This is the crucial difference between embodied attention and perception: if we are paying attention to a particular situation, the field of possibility that opens up for us is broader and richer than that which opens up if we are not.

But the opening up of a horizontal field is itself a change: whereas secondary attention, in line with its empiricist presupposition of the existence of external things, does not change anything in quality and only increases the sharpness of experienced things, primary attention brings about a change in the perceptual field. As an example of primary attention, we can take the classic scenario of a cocktail-party: we are focused on following a discussion with some colleagues, and therefore exclude surrounding sounds and events. But then, if somebody at the other side of the room says our name, our attention will be distracted and will turn, without any explicit decision on our part, to the person who says it. This turning will be paired with bodily movements (mostly saccadic movements of the eyes – an instance of what Merleau-Ponty calls “movements of the exploratory organs” in Merleau-Ponty 2004, 34) and will bring about a completely new field of experience, oriented according to different centres towards which our attention is directed. This is the claim of creativity of attention, according to which, therefore, attention moulds the field in which our experience plays out.

3 Some consequences of the proposed model

Drawing from the three features of embodied attention, it is now possible to spell out some crucial consequences. Let us focus first on the difference between primary and secondary attention (a), and afterwards on the difference between primary attention and perception (b).

  1. a.

    The differentiation between primary, embodied attention and secondary attention can be explained on the empirical level by the “dramatic” differences Yu et al. (2007, 452) find between adults and toddlers in focalizing attention. Even toddlers are attentive to stimuli, but according to Merleau-Ponty it seems questionable if it is possible to frame this kind of attention in purely cognitive and volitional concepts (Merleau-Ponty 2010). Cognitive and volitional, that is, secondary attention builds on primary attention, and is not a substitute for it.Footnote 11

    Moreover, the distinction between primary and secondary attention is not to be confused with the huge debates about top-down and bottom-up attentional mechanisms. Primary attention is neither at the top nor at the bottom, but – following Merleau-Ponty’s Gestalt phenomenological approach – in the phenomenon itself; that is, it is in the ‘form’ the experiential field takes up. This shaping is not just one-directional, either top-down or bottom-up, but is only possible when the subjective and objective sides of experience are both considered as playing together.

    In the same fashion, secondary attention is, although a mostly mental and volitional activity, only possible when adequately triggered by an interest located in the things we are attentive to. In this way, we can start to single out some aspects of this primary, embodied attention in contrast to secondary attention: it is pre-reflexive, unconscious (or at least pre-conscious), surveying, and based on possible movements of the exploratory organs.Footnote 12 These movements function in such a way that they open up a horizontal field and are such that, in a second step, I can interact with this field in meaningful ways through secondary attention.

    We can say that, in Merleau-Ponty’s understanding, we have a new approach to attention – although only in nuce. According to this account, attention is creative: it does not simply discover something always already there, but creates something new and reshapes the perceptual field.Footnote 13 This creativity of attention needs to be further explicated as embodied attention, as shown before.

  2. (b)

    In order to elucidate the difference between primary attention and perception, let me refer to the example used by Merleau-Ponty himself – not in the context of his explanation of attention, but during a survey, in The Structure of Behavior, of perception in general. He describes the experience of a football player from the point of view of his own version of phenomenology: “For the player in action the football field is not an ‘object’, that is, the ideal term which can give rise to a multiplicity of perspectival views and remain equivalent under its apparent transformations.” (Merleau-Ponty 1967, 168) As should be immediately clear, Merleau-Ponty is criticizing the constancy presupposition: the football field is not simply ‘out there’, waiting for our gaze to fall on it. Paying attention to the football field does not mean bringing the field into view; it means shaping the field in a new way. The field is not an object but is “pervaded with lines of force (the ‘yard lines’; those which demarcate the penalty area) and articulated in sectors (for example, the ‘openings’ between the adversaries) which call for a certain mode of action and which initiate and guide the action as if the player were unaware of it.” (Merleau-Ponty 1967, 168) Paying attention to the field does not imply a conscious and volitional activity of the player; it means rather to enter into a dialectic relation in which my bodily behaviour and the field constitute each other. Actions correspond to the line of forces offered by the field. Therefore, Merleau-Ponty can go on to claim that “[t]he field itself is not given to him, but present as the immanent term of his practical intentions; the player becomes one with it [fait corps avec lui: Merleau-Ponty 1942, 256] and feels the direction of the goal, for example just as immediately as the vertical and horizontal planes of his own body.” (Merleau-Ponty 1967, 168) The body of the football player and the field are merged into a unitary body according to the classical Gestalt view in which instruments and objects used in actions are just extensions of bodily organs. Merleau-Ponty writes:

It would not be sufficient to say that consciousness inhabits this milieu. At this moment consciousness is nothing other than the dialectic of milieu and action. Each manoeuvre undertaken by the player modifies the character of the field and establishes in it new lines of force in which the action in turn unfolds and is accomplished, again altering the phenomenal field (Merleau-Ponty 1967, 168).

We can now apply this example of the football player to an understanding of primary attention. Although Merleau-Ponty uses the example of the football player to illustrate perception, I think it is important to stress that the football player, to create a field of anticipation connecting her own body, other players’ movements, and the ball, must be paying attention to the game and not just ‘perceiving’ it in a superficial, i.e. distracted, way.Footnote 14 The first operation of attention is, according to the Phenomenology of Perception, the creation of the football field (viz. of its experience) as a specific field pervaded with lines of force and articulated in sectors. Within the experiential horizon opened up by perception, primary attention gains a crucial role in structuring the specific field (for the concept of ‘structuring’ in relation to attention see Watzl 2017). This can be phenomenologically seen in the fact that the more attentive we are, the better defined the field we create. The lines of force and sectors pervading the field are expectation lines and sectors: the experienced football player expects something to happen or not to happen, and the more attentive she is, the better his capacities for prediction are. Moreover, the way in which such forces and sectors are given is not objective (in the sense of an object ‘out there’) but bodily. The demarcation of the field follows the very demarcations that run through the body – such as, in this example, the possibility of the feet touching the ball, though not the hands (lest they incur a penalty). To focus on the distinction between perception and primary attention, we can therefore say that perception opens up a field of experience that is entirely unfocused and dispersed; up to some level it is, even if constituted by the Gestalt, chaotic. Also an embodied theory of perception needs to make sense of the difference between what is attended to and what is not attended to; primary, embodied attention supplies to this need by bringing a structure into perception itself.

Although, as is well known, Merleau-Ponty has a lot to say about perception from an embodied point of view, his discussion of primary attention is confined to a few lines in the Phenomenology of Perception, and even in later works attention does not play a central role in his theory. I have claimed that attention as a cognitive capacity (the spotlight) is based on a more fundamental bodily form of attention, which Merleau-Ponty calls ‘primary attention’ and which I wish to conceptualize as ‘embodied attention’. The classical understanding of attention as an active, volitional stance is a derivative experience, based on a mostly passive ability to assume an attentive attitude.

My model of attention is thus two-layered. The more basic and passive attentional attitude is made possible by an array of bodily activities, postures and needs that work together in order to give rise to volitional attentive behaviour. Indeed, in our everyday experience we only rarely deliberately decide to pay attention to something; mostly, our attention is called upon by surrounding things, people and events, and we react to these by changing bodily posture, by enacting movements (at least saccades) and so on.

Embodied attention can be characterized, according to this tentative approach, by three basic features we identified in the last section and that we now summarize: (1) embodiment is a feature of attention tout court: this is the claim of the transcendentalism of embodiment for attentional experience, since attention is dependent on the overall posture of the body, on movements of the organs that are appropriate to the situation, and on the satisfaction of basic needs; (2) embodied attention is not to be confused with bodily awareness: this is the claim of the bodily subjectivity of attention; (3) attention influences the meaning of our experience: this is the claim of the creativity of embodied attention.

  1. 1)

    The embodiment of attention represents a crucial feature of attentional experience as such; my claim is not just that some experiences of attention eminently claim the role of the body, but that even those activities usually regarded as ‘purely mental’ or at least ‘purely theoretical’ are possible only because the body is in play. Secondary attention builds upon embodied attention. In other words, the concept of embodied attention I am arguing for plays a transcendental role in shaping our everyday experiences independently from the particular actions and behavioural patterns actually involved.

  2. 2)

    Speaking of embodied attention is not the same as speaking of bodily awareness: the two concepts need to be differentiated. Whereas the concept of bodily awareness usually refers to proprioception or to attention directed towards our body, by ‘embodied attention’ I wish to describe bodily aspects of attention directed towards external objects, worldly events, and other people, in which the body is not the object, but the subject of attention. A similar difference holds not only for bodily awareness, but also for more general forms of awareness. Embodied attention is not just awareness (being-conscious-of) events or things in the surrounding world: (a) attention implies direct engagement of the the subject with its behaviour and actions; and (b) not everything I am aware of (in the sense of being-conscious-of) is also embodily attended to (on this see Depraz et al. 2003). Precisely because embodied attention implies behaviour and actions, and because what is attended to is just one section of my whole experience, this concept cannot be equated to the concept of vigilance either, which usually describes a general openness and receptivity to what surrounds us (on this see Depraz 2014).

    By distinguishing embodied and secondary attention and claiming that only the first plays a transcendental role in experience, we take up findings from different empirical sciences that show how the attentional shaping of our experience is dependent on the posture of body, movements of the organs and the satisfaction of basic needs. Through this, we come close to conclusions already put forward by Noë (2002) in an attempt to explain the phenomenon of inattentional blindness. According to Noë, inattentional blindness is explainable if attention is understood in sensorimotor terms. Indeed, inattentional blindness is often considered as a touchstone for theories of attention. Watching movements, as shown by Rizzolatti and his colleagues, also in relation to attention (see Rizzolatti et al. 1987; Craighero and Rizzolatti 2005; Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2008), involves the same brain areas as when the subject is moving herself. My claim is therefore that inattentional blindness is mostly related to embodied, primary attention (on the related problem of change-blindness see O'Regan et al. 1999, as well as Noë et al. 2000). One way to empirically test the feasibility of the proposed theory would be to measure the grade of inattentional blindness in attentive tasks related to perceptual content with strong motor components, and in abstract attentive tasks (such as the solution of a mathematical equation). Indeed, in the famous experiment concerning this phenomenon conducted by Simons and Chabris (1999) involving gorilla-dressed experimenters and bouncing basketballs, the gorilla is walking very slowly; the theory of embodied attention would be able to explain the fact that sudden movements would attract the attention of the observer much more strongly since they are much more significant in the overall context of our embodied experience. In this way, the phenomenology of embodied attention provides a working theory for the explanation of classical cases of inattentional blindness (see Mack and Rock 2003 for an overview).Footnote 15

  3. 3)

    We saw in the criticism of the spotlight model that a qualitative, not merely quantitative, difference between attention and perception exists. This difference was further spelled out as the role attention has in structuring the perceptual field. This function of structuring finds expression most directly in the fact that attention changes the meaning of the object we attend to: perceptual content is co-determined by attention understood as a creative function of the body.

    A similar position has been argued for by Nanay in a 2010 paper (Nanay 2010) and then defended (Nanay 2011) against Jagnow’s criticism (Jagnow 2011).Footnote 16 According to Nanay, the precise role of attention is to enhance determination of perceptual properties: “In short, attention makes (or attempts to make) the perceived property more determinate.” (Nanay 2013, 108). Indeed, the phenomenology of embodied attention shows how attention can play this role: by attending to wholes, the given properties (which are always also relational and linked to the horizon in which they appear) are perceived more sharply. In the same way that the attentive football player perceives enhanced determinations of the field because she is able to predict the course of action and move elegantly across the field itself, so in everyday experiences an attentional attitude toward an experience will enhance the determination of its perceptual properties. But the position of Nanay needs to be refined, for the concept of ‘enhancement’ still refers to a purely quantitative difference between perception and attention. If attention creates a meaning (in our example, only the conference we listen to attentively has real meaning), we can claim that only through attention do objects acquire a determinate form and structure and thereby take on a determinate meaning in our experience. According to this approach, attention is not just a sharpening of our experience, but changes it.

4 Conclusions

In this paper I have sketched a path of research: as I claimed at the start, more work needs to be done for a satisfying phenomenology of embodied cognition to be possible and in order to draw the possible consequences for empirical research and experimental applications. With a ‘phenomenology of embodied attention’ I have presented a philosophical framework at the threshold between phenomenology and embodied cognition that focuses on embodiment as a condition of attentional behaviour. The main aim of this text was to clarify some issues such an approach should (ideally) help to solve, and to foster a new debate that will need the conjoined efforts of phenomenologists, embodied-cognition theorists, psychologists, and empirical scientists working in different branches in order to reach a comprehensive account of embodied attention.