About neural implementation and microgenesis

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses neural implementation and microgenesis. It seems that Tsal has suggested a potentially very useful concept, that of attentional receptive fields, that is consistent with a multitude of empirical facts about the attentional effects on spatial discrimination. The main elements of the theory (such as the location detectors and overlapping receptive fields with their strong computational potential) are consistent both with the empirical facts from the psychophysics of attention and standard requirements for cognitive architectures in the context of computational approaches. What remains to be done, however, is to show that and how these abstract concepts relate to the neurophysiological reality of perceptual-attentional processing. Also, what stands behind the “assessment” of the activation levels of detectors in terms of the underlying neurophysiology? The main issue is undoubtedly the distinction between the structural and functional varieties of the pending neuroreductionist explanation for attentional-perceptual (pertentional?) interaction. Even if the neurophysiological reality contradicts the notion of structurally distinct units that subserve fine-tuned attentional receptive fields, the concept suggested by Tsal can still be useful in the applied contexts.