Foxes, hedgehogs, and attentional capture

ABSTRACT

Isaiah Berlin famously suggested that thinkers can be characterized into two groups, foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes multiply ideas, hedgehogs stretch them. Hedgehoggy thinking, based around core universal principles, has historically dominated capture research and is prominent in Luck, S. J., Gaspelin, N., Folk, C. L., Remington, R. W., & Theeuwes, J. (2021. Progress toward resolving the attentional capture debate. Visual Cognition, 29(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/13506285.2020.1848949). However, results increasingly suggest that attentional control is complicated and messy. There is a need for careful identification of neural bases and the development of incremental, contextual theory, i.e. there is a need for foxy thinking.

KEYWORDS:

• Attention
• capture
• control

Acknowledgments

CH is supported by a H2020 European Research Council Starting Grant (804360-INSENSE).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

CH is supported by a H2020 European Research Council Starting Grant (804360-INSENSE).