A Brief History of Attention

Ante Jerić (University of Rijeka)

Attention is more than an individual cognitive capacity or resource – its evolving forms directed the development of human cooperation, collective life, and culture. The ways in which our ancestors shared and organized their attention hold keys both to understanding our species' capacity for social scaling and the breakdown of shared attention in our current predicament. Throughout this lecture, and against the background of the work of Michael Tomasello, Joseph Henrich, Jonathan Beller, and Yves Citton, I will present a history of human attention across five major transformations:

· 6 Million Years Ago: Human sociality roots itself in competitive primate cognition. Great apes use individual attention to track rivals, manipulate social interactions, and navigate immediate hierarchies.
· 400 000 Years Ago: Facing environmental pressures, early humans adopt obligate collaborative foraging. Joint intentionality emerges, using gestures like pointing to synchronize attention on shared local goals.
· 150 000 Years Ago: Group expansion and intergroup competition scale dyadic focus into collective intentionality, aligning entire communities around shared cultural norms, language, and ritual practices.
· 5 000 Years Ago: Early agrarian states and written media institutionalize shared focus, externalizing group attention through formal legal codes, administrative systems, and narrative traditions.
· Today: Media algorithms commodify, extract, and fragment attention, posing a structural challenge to the cooperative capacity for shared intentionality that defined human social evolution.

Ante Jerić is a postdoctoral fellow at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka. He earned his PhD through the Transformation of Modern Thought doctoral program at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU). He is interested in the philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and narrative theory.