ABSTRACT
An account of attention is useful to theatre and performance studies for the obvious reason that attention is the necessary first step for coming to an understanding of how audiences grasp and respond to a performance. The chapter situates attention to performances within current debates about attention in psychology, neuroscience and philosophy. A full philosophical theory of theatre modeled as a signalling game must have at least three parts. A first part concerns how signals are generated and sent. A second part concerns how attendants pay attention to and have their attention captured by performances. A third part concerns how attendants draw further inferences, that is, develop and change their expectations or predictions about what is going to happen and what kind of thing is causing what they attend to, in response to changes in what they are attending.
