Attention is a concept that can only be understood in a way that has the capacity for real social impact if it is understood from the combined perspectives of the psychological, the social, and the historical, philosophical and cultural. However, it has never before been the subject of sustained broadly-interdisciplinary study.

Given its multi-dimensional nature, the problems and possibilities of attention in the contemporary world can only be recognised and addressed through radically multi- and interdisciplinary approaches that integrate the individual (their biology and cognition), the cultural and creative, the technological, the economic and the political.

We have created the Centre for Attention Studies at King’s (ASK) to respond to this challenge. Based at King’s College London, ASK is a hub for a global network of partners interested in collaborating within this field. ASK represents a multi- and interdisciplinary grouping of researchers and teachers combining the arts and humanities, the social and political sciences, business, health studies, computing and psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience, and more. It also works with a range of partners in policy, industry, the creative and charity sectors both to inform our work and to ensure meaningful impact.

Centre for Attention Studies at King’s (ASK)

Interim Director for 2023-24: Joanna Zylinska

Professor of Media Philosophy and Critical Digital Practice in the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. Joanna is the author of a number of books – including AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams (Open Humanities Press, 2020), The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press, 2017). She combines her philosophical writings with image-based art practice and curatorial work. She is currently researching attention, perception and cognition as boundary zones between human and machine intelligence, while trying to map out scenarios for alternative futures. She is also looking into human and machine ways of reading, with different forms of attention they demand and enable. Her latest book is The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future Between the Eye and AI (MIT Press, 2023).

Principal Investigator (Director): Marion Thain

Professor of Culture and Technology in the English department at King’s College London, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. Thain researches concepts of attention through her work on modes of ‘distributed cognition’ (focussed on intersections in the histories of psychology and culture), and through an experimental mode she terms ‘Distracted Reading’. Distracted Reading: Acts of Attention in the Age of the Internet (2018), brought together scholars from across the humanities, and across three continents. She is currently working on the history of modernity, technology, and distraction.

Joint Principal Investigator (Co-Director): Edmund Sonuga-Barke

Edmund Sonuga-Barke is currently Professor of Developmental Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Institute of Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience, Kings College London. Motivated by his own experience of growing up as a child with learning difficulties his research has focused on improving the lives of children and adolescents with neuro-developmental disorders such as ADHD. To this end, his work aims to develop new therapeutic interventions by employing basic developmental science approaches to study the pathogenesis of such conditions, their underlying genetic and environmental risk and resilience sources and their mediating brain mechanisms and developmental and mental health outcomes.  More generally he has been at forefront in the conceptualisation of attention deficits – developing and popularising innovative theories of their motivated nature, developmental origins and diversity of form and function.

Co-Investigator: Ko de Ruyter

Ko de Ruyter is Vice Dean Research, Professor of Marketing at King’s College London and Adjunct Professor of Marketing at UNSW Sydney. His research focuses on intersections of health care, technological innovations and consumer well-being. He has published widely in flagship academic business journals, such as the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Consumer Research and Management Science. In pursuit of rigour and relevance, Ko leads a number of global research teams that apply marketing scholarship to issues that are relevant to society. Now, perhaps more than ever, in turbulent economic times, there is a need for guidance in strategy development that builds on fundamental as well as versatile thinking. Ko de Ruyter is able to offer such thinking and push its translation into actionable advice for businesses and policy makers. For his leadership in the academic research community, Professor de Ruyter has been awarded a life-time achievement by the American Marketing Association.

Co-Investigator: Bobby Duffy

Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Policy Institute. The Policy Institute will support – in three ways — the project’s researchers in creating policy-relevant insights into the contemporary landscape and economy of attention and accelerating the impact of that work. First, it will use its communications expertise to connect research insights into attention with key audiences, including policymakers and officials. Second, it will deploy its tested Policy Lab methodology to convene experts, practitioners, and policymakers to outline the evidence and test policy responses. Finally, it will draw on its own research expertise to identify and inform key policy challenges for the study of Attention.

Co-Investigator: Alfie Abdul-Rahman

Lecturer in Computer Science at the Department of Informatics, King’s College London. The Human Centred Computing group in Informatics is internationally recognized for its seminal and cutting-edge research in empirical design, user centred methodologies, visual analytics, information visualization, natural language processing, human computer interaction. AAR has specialist expertise in theory, practice, and applications of visualization, including empirical studies of human (and attentional) factors in visualization.

Co-Investigator: Mark Pennington

Mark Pennington is Professor of Public Policy and Political Economy in the Department of Political Economy where he was Head of the Department between 2016 and 2020. Mark is currently Director of the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society https://csgs.kcl.ac.uk/ . His work takes place at the intersection of philosophy, politics and economics with a particular focus on exploring problems of limited knowledge or bounded rationality and their relationship to ‘ideal’ and ‘non-ideal’ theorising in economics and political theory. This approach was exemplified in his 2011 book Robust Political Economy. Mark has written widely on these topics including analyses of environmental governance, social capital, and the relationship between markets and democratic citizenship. In 2021 he will be starting a new three year research grant on the ‘Political Economy of Knowledge and Ignorance’ involving two book projects – ‘Free Markets and Green Ideals’, and ‘Foucault and the Road to Freedom: power-knowledge and political economy’.