Imagination, endogenous attention, and mental agency
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences April 21, 2023 Tom Cochrane 3 citations
Basic mental agency—the ability to voluntarily direct one's own thoughts—is grounded in two core capacities: endogenous attention and imagination. This paper argues that these capacities share five key features: both are driven by currently prioritized goals that are or can become conscious; both deliver their outputs to working memory; both operate on conceptual content; both are guided by norms or habits; and both activate rather than inhibit mental content. Together, these similarities suggest that basic mental agency is fundamentally the power to summon conceptual content and hold it in working memory.