nucleation

THEORY-1341: In Jennings's hybrid account, attention is prioritization of processing by a subject that is the whole collection of an organism's fixed, formed and fluid interests, separated from filtering by whether selection answers to that collection, marked by feedback from dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; when interests are equally weighted, attention breaks the stalemate and updates the chosen option's value, so that a fluid interest becomes a formed one

2 min read

Properties4
StatusProposed
Tagsneuroscience, agency, free-will
SourceLIT-1963 — Attention as the Source of a Free Will
Cited as “grounds” byCLAIM-539 — Jennings's attention as the source of a free will has Frankfurt's two-level architecture with its upper level changed from an attitude to a process: the whole collection of an agent's interests, prioritizing, settles which first-order interest becomes effective, as a second-order volition does for Frankfurt, but by metacontrol and not by endorsement; so it inherits unchanged the objection that a manipulated organization can meet the condition, and what it adds to Frankfurt is that the process forms new interests and is a contextually emergent cause

Graph View

Source

Jennings (2026), LIT-1963, pp. 21–32 of the manuscript of 2026-10-29; read in NOTE-1508.

What was actually shown

Nothing new was measured. The paper assembles:

  • A definition. “A subject is a collection of interests with the power to constrain those interests” (p. 21), and attention is “prioritization by the subject, or by this collection of interests, which is separable from local filtering and automatic selection” (p. 32).
  • A criterion. “One way of determining this is through the presence or absence of feedback from dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), since such feedback is essential for the expression of fluid interests” (p. 32). The support is that prefrontal feedback is “widely considered to be necessary for interests that require ongoing maintenance” (p. 31), while reward history can drive selection without it (Awh, Belopolsky and Theeuwes 2012).
  • A mechanism, from Voigt 2022 (LIT-1976): with equally valued options, dlPFC and precuneus raise attention on one, “allowing for both a decision and an updating of values in the memory system” (p. 25).

Each could have been otherwise: selection between equal options could be noise-driven with no later preference change, or prefrontal feedback could accompany formed-interest selection as well.

What this does not say

  • That the subject is non-reducible. That is THEORY-1314, a separate and weaker part of the paper.
  • That attention so defined is free will. The paper’s step from here to sourcehood is asserted (NOTE-1508, C6).
  • That the stalemate mechanism is established. It is one model, cited.
  • That the subject is the agent’s own. A collection whose interests were installed meets the definition (QUESTION-071).

Note of 2026-11-03: Voigt, read

Voigt 2022 (NOTE-1517, THEORY-1326) is an Opinion article, and in its model the attention that breaks a stalemate is allocated bottom-up, to the salient item by the precuneus, and only held by dlPFC. The value update is correlational. That undercuts dlPFC feedback as the mark of fluid interests in exactly the stalemate case the account rests on.

Backlinks