Ecologies of Attention and Perception

Please join us for the celebration of the re-launch of the Centre for the Ecologies of Attention and Perception at King’s College London. The Centre is an interdisciplinary hub investigating how attention and perception are shaped by digital technologies and social infrastructures. A space for thinking and making, it brings together research and creative experimentation to explore how attention operates across human and more-than-human worlds. Our research refracts attention through philosophy, social theory, psychology, neuroscience, media studies and creative practice to reveal its ethical, aesthetic, social and technical dimensions. The Centre’s name reflects our commitment to exploring attention as a distributed, mediated and ecological phenomenon which is closely entangled with perception. The Centre is thus a space where the complexities of attention and perception can be studied, visualised and reimagined.

Free and open to all; booking required.

Programme

‘Ecologies of Attention and Perception’: Introduction and Welcome from the Centre Directors, Professor Joanna Zylinska and Dr Feng Zhu

Dr James Stazicker, ‘What is Attention? (And Who Should Answer This Question?)’

Dr Gabriele Salciute Civiliene , ‘More-Than-Human Infrastructures: Language, Attention and Digital Media’

Dr Rob Gallagher, ‘“There to soak up the player’s time and attention”: Immersion in Ludobiographical Literature’

Dr Oliver R. Runswick, ‘Attention and Perception in Human Performance’

Q&A

Drinks reception

Abstracts and speakers’ bios

Dr James Stazicker, 'What is attention? (And who should answer this question?)'

In contemporary philosophy, it is standard to treat definitional questions about psychological capacities – ‘What is perception?’, ‘What is memory?’ – as questions about natural kinds, answerable by deferring to our best science; compare ‘What is gold?’ or ‘What is a tiger?’. I will sketch some challenges to this approach in the case of attention, stemming from the diversity of natural phenomena associated with attending, and from the relationship between attention and subjective experience. A good answer to the question ‘What is attention?’ may need to be more deeply interdisciplinary than is often supposed.

Dr James Stazicker is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy of Psychology. He teaches for the Philosophy and Psychology Departments at King’s. His research is in the philosophy and science of consciousness and perceptual experience. He was previously Lecturer at the University of Reading and Bersoff Assistant Professor at New York University. He is Philosophy Programme Chair for the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology.

Dr Gabriele Salciute Civiliene, ‘More-Than-Human Infrastructures: Language, Attention and Digital Media’

In this presentation I will argue that we face an interesting paradox when we discuss language, attention and digital media/technologies in relation to one another. As cognitive systems, both language and attention facilitate and shape our being in the world. On the one hand, language mobilizes and encodes our own and public attention. On the other, attention is crucial to managing language complexity. Both language and attention shape what media and technologies become in our imagination and actual use. Yet these mediating and enabling functions of our cognitive systems are paradoxically obscured by linguistic means and through inattention in the narratives dominated by technoscience and traditional epistemologies. A more-than-human perspective might open the ways to begin recognizing the ecological entanglements and metabolic fluidity between organic and non-organic systems. Yet it also raises the question as to how we might practice thinking about, and theorizing, the critical functions of language, attention and media in sustainable ways.

Gabriele Salciute Civiliene SFHEA is Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities at King’s College London. She specialises in digital humanities methods and immersive technologies for linguistic, intellectual and cultural heritage. She pioneered the cross-linguistics methods for Distant Reading across Languages / DRaL, and leads VR Ethnography and Literature across Languages / VR-ELL and curatorial initiatives Ukraine: Architectures of Despair and Hope/ KCL Films for Ukraine. She is the founder of the Un.censor.ing network, King’s Digital Futures Institute Fellow 2025, King’s Culture Creative Practice Catalyst recipient 2026, and is a lead of the XR and Attention Research Group and member of the King's Institute of Human and Synthetic Minds.

Dr Rob Gallagher, ‘“There to soak up the player’s time and attention”: Immersion in Ludobiographical Literature’

The term ‘immersive’ is as ubiquitous as it is slippery. Rather than attempting to define immersion, this talk explores how subjects use immersive media to effect transitions between states of (un)consciousness and (in)sensitivity, drawing on accounts of digital gameplay from memoirs, personal essays, autobiographical games and other forms of gamer life-writing. It argues that these texts are animated by a tension between the autobiographical mode and what it calls the ludobiographical mode. The classical autobiography has been seen as a powerful vehicle for the humanist conception of the subject. In ludobiographical writing, by contrast, we can see how videogames, in the ways that they organise, direct and hold players’ attention, address a different kind of subject, undercutting, by so doing, the writers’ sense of themselves as reflexive, agential individuals in possession of their own bodies, identities and stories. Focusing on short texts by memoirists Larissa Pham and Carmen Maria Machado, the paper proposes that these authors embrace games as opportunities to feel less human.

Rob Gallagher is a Lecturer in Digital Media Industries at King’s College London, where he co-directs the Digital Futures MA programme. He has published widely on digital culture and gaming, focusing on how videogames reflect and shape popular conceptions of identity, sexuality and subjectivity. He is the author of Videogames, Identity and Digital Subjectivity (Routledge, 2017) and Artgames after Gamergate (Palgrave, 2025).

Dr Oliver R. Runswick, ‘Attention and Perception in Human Performance’

Understanding the ecologies of attention and perception is central to optimising the learning and execution of skilled human performance. This talk will present a series of examples from our lab illustrating how these processes can be studied, measured, and shaped using emerging technologies to address key challenges across high performance domains, from elite sport to human spaceflight. A particular focus will be on the assessment and training of perceptual–cognitive skill, where expert performers demonstrate superior abilities to direct attention to task relevant information sources, extract meaningful patterns, and anticipate future events, including insights from applications to support mission success in the emerging era of human spaceflight. We will then discuss the role of perceptual processes in shaping individuals’ experiences of exercise, and how immersive technologies may be used to manipulate these experiences to enhance engagement and performance. Finally, we will outline our emerging work on neurodivergent populations who experience difference in attention and perception, examining how performance environments can be designed to better support individuals to thrive.

Oliver Runswick is a Senior Lecturer in Performance Psychology and Deputy Director of the BSc Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience. Ollie is a Chartered Psychologist, a CASES Accredited Sport and Exercise Scientist, Editor in Chief of the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills, and Chair of the Expertise and Skill Acquisition Network. He is co-lead of the Multidisciplinary Occupational Research for Performance and Health (MORPH Lab) and a member of the Spacesuit Physiology Laboratory, IoPPN Virtual Reality Lab and ADHD Lab. He is focused on applied research across the main themes of (i) future technology in sport, exercise, and health, (ii) neurodiversity and mental health in human performance, and (iii) applied vision and cognitive sciences and applied this work in domains from sport to spaceflight.