Lecturer: Gaia Belardinelli

This course is an introduction to formal models of attention, as studied in logic, philosophy, economics and computer science.

Imagine following a discussion in a group. You attend to the points that seem most relevant or familiar to you, while other remarks pass unnoticed. The line of thought you take reflects what you attended to, while what you overlooked never enters your reasoning.

Why does this happen? Attention directs our reasoning and inquiry: what we attend to enters our deliberations and shapes how we update our beliefs, while what we fail to attend to is left out. Since attention is a limited resource, attending to some aspects of the available information necessarily means neglecting others, making it important to decide what to pay attention to. Because attention reflects both our individual priorities and the social contexts in which we are embedded, what we attend to is structured in systematic ways.

In this course, we introduce recent formal models of attention that address questions such as: what exactly is attention? How does it influence epistemic reasoning and the possibilities agents consider? What role does it play in belief and knowledge updates, and how does it relate to nearby notions such as awareness and observability?

Topics include epistemic logic of attention; models of attention as a limited resource; logics of awareness and logics of observability. Beyond logical models, the course also draws on work in philosophy and economics, where attention is studied, for instance, in connection with social biases and as a finite resource that influences decision-making.