Attention as Distinction Admission in Finite Systems: Capacity-Limited Gating, Boundary Relevance, and Tunnel Vision

Yining Wu · 2026-05-17

Attention paper in the agency-semantics spine. Treats attention as capacity-limited admission of candidate distinctions into an update channel. Separates attention from salience, introduces verification status classes (attended-as-trusted, attended-for-verification, rejected-unverified), background scanning, boundary-gradient attention value, tunnel vision under semantic deficit, attention hysteresis and recovery lag, collective attention under epistemic pollution, and nine attention failure modes.

@misc{wu2026fdsm1,
  author = {Yining Wu},
  title = {Attention as Distinction Admission in Finite Systems: Capacity-Limited Gating, Boundary Relevance, and Tunnel Vision},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.5281/zenodo.20258570},
}