8/21/25 Gordon Logan: Imagine no resources (it’s easy if you try)
CCN BROWN BAG
Gordon Logan, PhD
Centennial Professor of Psychology
Date: August 21, 2025
Time: 12:10- 1:00pm
Location: 316 Wilson Hall
Imagine no resources (it’s easy if you try)
The concept of capacity is foundational in the cognitive psychology of attention. Over 75 years, researchers have explained an amazing range of phenomena as the consequence of limited-capacity attention. I will present a critical analysis of the concept of capacity and theories of attention that assume it, arguing that they don’t explain attention: They don’t say why capacity is limited or how capacity is used in the computations that tasks require. I will show that limited capacity is not necessary to explain the load effects and serial attention in dual tasks that capacity theories were designed to explain. These phenomena can be explained more generally as constraints imposed by the nature of choice. At best, capacity is a measure, not a theory. I will argue for an alternative view that is widely endorsed outside conventional attention research, in which selectivity and normalization are all you need to explain attentional phenomena theoretically and computationally.