Attention Expenditure Measure
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
An Attention Expenditure Measure is a resource consumption measure that quantifies the attention a person spends on an activity, in time or effort, as distinct from a mental attention measure of how selectively a person attends.
- Context:
- It can typically treat attention as a scarce resource that information and activities consume, as in the attention economy.
- It can typically be expressed as time, either as an absolute duration, such as a resumption lag in seconds, or as a fraction of an operator's time, such as a robot attention demand.
- ...
- It can be expressed as effort, following the view that attention can be identified with mental effort, a view that later work disputes.
- It can be modeled as attentional demands that flow through a team of people, robots and AI agents with bounded capacity.
- ...
- It can range from being a time-based measure, such as seconds of attention, to being an effort-based measure.
- ...
- It can be used to estimate the attention cost of supervising an automated system or a team of robots and AI agents.
- It can be distorted under Goodhart's Law when it is used as a target.
- ...
- Example(s):
- a Robot Attention Demand Measure, the fraction of an operator's time that one robot requires.
- a Resumption Lag, the time a person spends re-orienting to an interrupted task.
- the time cost part of an Interruption Cost Measure, such as the time an interruption adds to a primary task.
- ...
- Counter-Example(s):
- a Mental Attention Measure, which concerns how selectively a person concentrates rather than how much attention an activity consumes.
- an Attention Economy, which is an economic market that treats human attention as a scarce commodity rather than a measure of attention spent.
- a Cognitive Skill Measure, which evaluates a person's ability to perform cognitive tasks rather than the attention a given activity costs.
- See: Attention Economy, Mental Attention Measure, Human Attention Measure, Scarce Resource, Information Overload State.
References
2026
- (Wikipedia, 2026) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy Retrieved:2026-10-08.
- QUOTE: ... The concept of attention economics was first theorized by psychologist and economist Herbert A. Simon when he wrote about the scarcity of attention in an information-rich world in 1971:
[I]n an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
- QUOTE: ... Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck add to that definition:
Attention is focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. Items come into our awareness, we attend to a particular item, and then we decide whether to act.
- QUOTE: ... The concept of attention economics was first theorized by psychologist and economist Herbert A. Simon when he wrote about the scarcity of attention in an information-rich world in 1971:
- (Goodrich et al., 2026) ⇒ Michael A. Goodrich, Logan Shields, and Julie A. Adams. (2026). “Reframing the Human–Robot Ratio: Collaborative Autonomy and the Attention‐Demand Economy.” In: AI Magazine, 47(3).
- ABSTRACT: ... We propose the attention‐demand economy, a graph‐theoretic abstraction in which agents generate and transform attentional demands subject to bounded capacity. ... The primary message of this paper is a call to shift from optimizing human–robot ratios to designing organizations with justified attention flows.
2018
- (Bruya & Tang, 2018) ⇒ Brian J. Bruya, and Yi-Yuan Tang. (2018). “Is Attention Really Effort? Revisiting Daniel Kahneman’s Influential 1973 Book Attention and Effort.” In: Frontiers in Psychology, 9.
- ABSTRACT: Daniel Kahneman was not the first to suggest that attention and effort are closely associated, but his 1973 book Attention and Effort, which claimed that attention can be identified with effort, cemented the association as a research paradigm in the cognitive sciences. ... We then weigh this conception of effort against evidence in Kahneman's book and against more recent evidence, finding that it does not warrant the conclusion that effort can be equated with attention. ...