“What” and “Where” in Visual Attention

Psychologists often speak of “allocating attention to stimuli”, but in fact this manner of speaking obscures an important fact about attention. Attention is not allocated to stimuli, but to internal representations of stimuli. Although it may seem pedantic to emphasise such an obvious point, doing so alerts us to the central role of representation in any theory of attention. One cannot explain attention without having specified the nature of the visual representations on which it operates.