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Priority Map Dissociation in Autism and PTSD
An architectural constraint on selection-for-action.
"Attention disorders" groups autism, PTSD, ADHD, and others into one bucket. This paper asks whether that bucket names one kind of breakdown or several mechanistically different ways attention can be tuned, and argues that the answer changes what a leading philosophical theory of attention has to commit to.
"The deficit framing of attention conditions is what happens when a normative parameterization is mistaken for the architecture itself."
The Argument
- The framework. I defend Wayne Wu's selection-for-action view, on which attention is the process that settles which inputs drive which actions, against Sebastian Watzl's priority-structure account.
- The model. The priority map combines bottom-up salience with top-down relevance. I grant Awh, Belopolsky, and Theeuwes that the clean two-way split fails, and keep a weaker claim: map construction has at least two functionally distinct stages that can be tuned independently.
- Autism: the early stage. Enhanced perceptual functioning, impaired disengagement in the orienting network, and fMRI hypoactivation that tracks repetitive-behavior scores all point to a difference in early, salience-driven weighting, with later goal-directed control relatively intact.
- PTSD: the late stage. Amygdala hyperactivity with reduced ventromedial prefrontal regulation reweights what counts as relevant given threat history. Low-level perception is intact. It is the inverse pattern.
- The constraint. For selection-for-action to predict these different profiles, and not just accommodate whatever turns up, it has to accept that the priority map has independently tunable components. I answer the state-space objection from Todd and Manaligod and the reply that a metaphysical account owes no predictions.
- Difference, not deficit. If stages can be tuned independently, a non-neurotypical tuning is not a broken copy of the standard map. Drawing on Munton and Whiteley, I argue the deficit framing is a normative claim, not a discovery about how attention works.
Why It's Here
This is the neuroscience and philosophy side of the same question my engineering work asks: how a system decides what matters. It is also the ground my senior thesis on gaze and action grows from, with the same mentor.
Read the Paper
Draws On
Philosophy of mindAttentionPriority mapsCognitive neurosciencefMRI literatureNeurodiversity