Nonspatial attentional shifts between audition and vision

This study investigated nonspatial shifts of attention between visual and auditory modalities. The authors provide evidence that the modality of a stimulus (S1) affected the processing of a subsequent stimulus (S2) depending on whether they shared the same modality. For both vision and audition, the onset of S1 summoned attention exogenously to its modality, causing a delay in processing S2 in a different modality. That undermines the notion that auditory stimuli have a stronger and more automatic alerting effect than visual stimuli (M. I. Posner, M. J. Nissen, & R. M. Klein, 1976). The results are consistent with other recent studies showing cross-modal attentional limitation. The authors suggest that such cross-modal limitation can be produced by simply presenting S1 and S2 in different modalities and that central processing mechanisms are also, at least partially, modality dependent.     

Gestures of work: Levinas and Hegel

What is Levinas's relation to Hegel, the thinker who seems to summarize everything which Levinas's philosophy opposes, yet with whom Levinas never enters a sustained philosophical engagement? An answer can be found through an analysis of the concept of work, understood both as activity of labor and product thereof. The concept of work reveals that, despite the apparent (but superficial) sense of opposition, Levinas's philosophy works in a deliberately noncommittal, or, to use a Levinasian expression, ``dis-interested'' mode with respect to Hegel. Such mode of disinterstedness expresses an ethical gesture of joyful hospitality that neither confirms nor refutes the German philosopher but rather opens him up to an eschatological dimension.     

The time of the feminine: for a politics of maternal corporeality. Tina Chanter,Time, Death,and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger

Continental Philosophy Review -     

Automatic and voluntary focusing of attention

In this study, we investigate whether attentional focusing, like attentional orienting, comprises two independent mechanisms. We provide direct empirical evidence in favor of the existence of two mechanisms--one exogenous, or automatic, and one endogenous, or voluntary--that play a role in adjusting the size of the focus of attention. When a new object suddenly occurs in the visual field, the focus is first automatically fitted to it, and then an endogenous effort has to be exerted to maintain attention in the focused mode. Also, we provide evidence that voluntary focusing needs a perceptual object in order to operate.