I think you can have involuntary attention that aren’t particularly related to wanting anything (I’m not sure if you’re denying that).
I agree you can, but that’s not motivational salience. The examples you give of the watch beeping and a sudden loud sound are stimulus-driven or bottom-up salience, not motivational salience. There are apparently different underlying brain mechanisms. A summary from Kim et al., 2021:
Traditionally, the allocation of limited attentional resources had been thought to be governed by task goals (Wolfe, Cave, & Franzel, 1989) and physical salience (Theeuwes, 2010). A newer construct, selection history, challenges this dichotomy and suggests previous episodes of attentional orienting are capable of independently biasing attention in a manner that is neither top-down nor bottom-up (Awh, Belopolsky, & Theeuwes, 2012). One component of selection history is reward history. Via associative learning, initially neutral stimuli come to predict reward and thus acquire heightened attentional priority, consequently capturing attention even when non-salient and task-irrelevant (referred to as value-driven attentional capture; e.g., Anderson, Laurent, & Yantis, 2011).
I’d say there is some “innate” motivational salience, e.g. probably for innate drives, physical pains, innate fears and perhaps pleasant sensations, but then reinforcement (when it’s working as typically) biases your systems for motivational salience and action towards things associated with those, to get more pleasure and less unpleasantness.
I’ll address two things you said in opposite order.
The thing you wrote is kinda confusing in my ontology. I’m concerned that you’re slipping into a mode where there’s a soul / homunculus “me” that gets manipulated by the exogenous pressures of reinforcement learning. If so, I think that’s a bad ontology—reinforcement learning is not an exogenous pressure on the “me” concept, it is part of how the “me” thing works and why it wants what it wants. Sorry if I’m misunderstanding.
I don’t have in mind anything like a soul / homunculus. I think it’s mostly a moral question, not an empirical one, to what extent we should consider the mechanisms for reinforcement to be a part of “you”, and to what extent your identity persists through reinforcement. Reinforcement basically rewires your brain and changes your desires. I definitely consider your desires, as motivational salience, which have been shaped by past reinforcement, to be part of “you” now and (in my view) morally important.
In my ontology, voluntary actions (both attention actions and motor actions) happen if and only if the idea of doing them is positive-valence, while involuntary actions (again both attention actions and motor actions) can happen regardless of their valence. In other words, if the reinforcement learning system is the reason that something is happening, it’s “voluntary”.
From my understanding of the cognitive (neuro)science literature and their use of terms, attentional and action biases/dispositions caused by reinforcement are not necessarily “voluntary”.
I think they use “voluntary”, “endogenous”, “top-down”, “task-driven/directed” and “goal-driven/directed” (roughly) interchangeably for a type of attentional mechanism. For example, you have a specific task in mind, and then things related to that task become salient and your actions are biased towards actions that support that task. This is what focusing/concentration is. But then other motivationally salient stimuli (pain, hunger, your phone, an attractive person) and intense stimuli or changes in background stimuli (a beeping watch, a sudden loud noise) can get in the way.
My impression is that there is indeed a distinct mechanism describable as voluntary/endogenous/top-down attention, which lets you focus and block irrelevant but otherwise motivationally salient stimuli. It might also recruit motivational salience towards relevant stimuli. It’s an executive function. And I’m inclined to reserve the term “voluntary” for executive functions.
In this way, we can say:
a drug addict’s behaviour is often (largely) involuntarily driven, specifically by high motivational salience, like cravings (and perhaps also dysfunction of top-down attention control), and
the distractibility of someone with ADHD by their phone or random websites, for example, is involuntary, driven by a dysfunction of top-down attention control, which lets task-irrelevant stimuli, including task-irrelevant motivationally salient stimuli, pull the person’s attention.
In both cases, reinforcement for motivational salience is partly the reason for the behaviour. But they seem less voluntary than when executive/top-down control works better.
Motivational salience can also be manipulated in experiments to lead to dissociation with remembered, predicted and actual reward (Baumgartner et al., 2021):
These hyper-reactive states of mesolimbic systems can even cause ‘wanting for what hurts’, such as causing a laboratory rat to compulsively seek out electric shocks repeatedly. In such cases, the ‘miswanted’ shock stimulus is remembered to hurt, predicted to hurt, and actually does hurt—yet is still positively sought as a target of incentive motivation.
I agree you can, but that’s not motivational salience. The examples you give of the watch beeping and a sudden loud sound are stimulus-driven or bottom-up salience, not motivational salience. There are apparently different underlying brain mechanisms. A summary from Kim et al., 2021:
I’d say there is some “innate” motivational salience, e.g. probably for innate drives, physical pains, innate fears and perhaps pleasant sensations, but then reinforcement (when it’s working as typically) biases your systems for motivational salience and action towards things associated with those, to get more pleasure and less unpleasantness.
I’ll address two things you said in opposite order.
I don’t have in mind anything like a soul / homunculus. I think it’s mostly a moral question, not an empirical one, to what extent we should consider the mechanisms for reinforcement to be a part of “you”, and to what extent your identity persists through reinforcement. Reinforcement basically rewires your brain and changes your desires. I definitely consider your desires, as motivational salience, which have been shaped by past reinforcement, to be part of “you” now and (in my view) morally important.
From my understanding of the cognitive (neuro)science literature and their use of terms, attentional and action biases/dispositions caused by reinforcement are not necessarily “voluntary”.
I think they use “voluntary”, “endogenous”, “top-down”, “task-driven/directed” and “goal-driven/directed” (roughly) interchangeably for a type of attentional mechanism. For example, you have a specific task in mind, and then things related to that task become salient and your actions are biased towards actions that support that task. This is what focusing/concentration is. But then other motivationally salient stimuli (pain, hunger, your phone, an attractive person) and intense stimuli or changes in background stimuli (a beeping watch, a sudden loud noise) can get in the way.
My impression is that there is indeed a distinct mechanism describable as voluntary/endogenous/top-down attention, which lets you focus and block irrelevant but otherwise motivationally salient stimuli. It might also recruit motivational salience towards relevant stimuli. It’s an executive function. And I’m inclined to reserve the term “voluntary” for executive functions.
In this way, we can say:
a drug addict’s behaviour is often (largely) involuntarily driven, specifically by high motivational salience, like cravings (and perhaps also dysfunction of top-down attention control), and
the distractibility of someone with ADHD by their phone or random websites, for example, is involuntary, driven by a dysfunction of top-down attention control, which lets task-irrelevant stimuli, including task-irrelevant motivationally salient stimuli, pull the person’s attention.
In both cases, reinforcement for motivational salience is partly the reason for the behaviour. But they seem less voluntary than when executive/top-down control works better.
Motivational salience can also be manipulated in experiments to lead to dissociation with remembered, predicted and actual reward (Baumgartner et al., 2021):