UCLA

My dissertation contributes to the study of agency by furthering our understanding of individuals' guidance of their acts. When individuals guide a shift of visual attention, their central executive system assigns priority to locations on the priority map. The central executive system is a psychological system for intermodal, often amodal, non-modular processing. The priority map is a representational state with geometrically structured content, representing the field of vision. This representational state helps direct attention shifts to their destination. I argue that, when an individual (with a psychology relevantly similar to that of actual primates) guides her shifts of visual attention, then her central executive system's control over those shifts actually constitutes her guidance.