Luria on attention

c. 10 Working Brain p. 256
Begins with a discussion of old papers, including Rubin (Gestalt school) who argued attention does not exist, and idealists (Wundt, Revault d'allones) who describe it as the subject's set or "creative activity" at the other pole.

He then refers to Vygotsky and to the intense biological attentional factors present early in life between a child and mother. The child turns the eyes and the head towards the stimulus, ceases irrelevant activity, and has autonomic and GSR responses which Bekhterev called the concentration reaction and Pavlov the orienting reflex. These are observed in the first few weeks of life, first with the fixation on an external object, then with an active search for it. Luria cites research that infants will cease sucking in response to photic stimulation. Later there is inhibition of the alpha rhythm and strengthening of the evoked potentials. Sokolov and Vinogradova described many features of it. Orienting reflex is directive and selective; after extinction to an acoustic stimulus, OR still occurs to other auditory stimuli. Orienting reflex occurs on any mismatch beween neuronal model and the new stimulus.

Luria then differentiates voluntary attention and OR. The former is not biological but a social act. They are not the product of the biological maturation of the organism, but of forms of activity created in the child in his relations with adults, into the organization of complex regulation of cerebral activity. The mother names the object, the child attends to the object, learns to name it himself, and it now is part of his internal organization of psychological process. Thus Vygotsky's differentiation between elementary and higher forms of attention and its social nature is key.

Vygotsky points out that in young children, involuntary attention competes with voluntary attention, and not till age 4 can the child suppress an involuntary OR to a spoken directive to attend to a different object, eg. Internal voluntary attention is then subordinated not only to adults but also to the child's own inner speech. He cites research by Homskaya that children given a sorting task have higher accuracy when allowed to sort by speech.

Luria then cites EP literature that EP show strengthening with OR, but lasting changes only with spoken instructions.

Luria believes the hippocampus and the caudate nucleus contain the internal maps for comparison that generate the OR. A lesion of them causes a breakdown in selective attention more than memory.