The Theory of Attention as Internal Action

Attention as Internal Action is an emerging theory that conceptualizes attention as an internal act of accessing information resources from memory [1]. A personality is viewed as an internal agent that is signalized with internal events by automatic unconscious process that retrieve, organize or generate information entities. When information entities are ready, the internal agent may select one at a time for access. This process is called internal decision making. When the internal agent selects an information entity, the stage of internal action execution begins. In it, the internal agent experiences a conscious imagery experience. At this stage the automatic unconscious processing unit starts providing the information it previously processed and at the same time the agent internally observes it—performing an internal action. When this phenomenon ends, a single iteration of the cognitive cycle is complete [2].

Before the concepts and hypotheses of the theory were systematized and strictly formulated, the theoretical approach of Attention as Action was used to explain conscious experiences [3]. The approach has been applied in illustrating internal decisions during crisis situations [4] and metacognitive experiences [5]. It has also been incorporated in discovering relations between cognitive architectures by defining automatic unconscious processes as memory processes and internal actions as conscious imagery experience generators [3].

Computational Cognition

The knowledge of the theory has been used in developing a computational method that simulates cognition [1]. An experiment was conducted to simulate how a student makes internal decisions to access information during the process of taking a digital exam. The different stages that occur when the student is thinking about a question and answering it, were simulated with the newest version of the General Internal Model of Attention (GIMA) — a cognitive architecture that generalizes collected and systematized knowledge about mental and perceptual imagery [1].