(Lawrence Berger, Critchley2017)
Heidegger similarly sees attention as the way we gain access to things, but otherwise he sees it quite differently from how it is conceived in cognitive science. For Heidegger attention is how things come into presence for us. (His most sustained meditation on attention can be found in his lectures, “What Is Called Thinking?” GA8) To see this, note that if we stay with the movement of attention from moment to moment, we see that it moves from entity to entity; that is, things come into presence at the foreground and then recede into the background.
For example, suppose I have to write a report, but there is noise in the other room, I have a pain in my leg, and I am worried that my spouse’s eye may be wandering. To get the report done attention has to stay with the task, but there are competing influences that can take over the foreground and relegate the task to the background. All of these are potential foci of attention that come to the surface and then withdraw as another comes to the fore.
Heidegger’s approach is to inquire into the nature of “being,” which is simply understood to be how things in general come into presence and then withdraw. This means that attention is the human side of a universal process of manifestation of entities, with an associated effort that is referred to as vigilance in the cognitive science literature. This effort of staying with the entities that we encounter is crucially important for Heidegger, for if attention is how we gain access to anything at all, then staying with an entity would enable a deeper revelation of its nature. In this regard he emphasizes the fact that entities are made manifest over the course of time (hence his famous 1927 work, Being and Time). The idea is that staying with an entity as it unfolds affects the manner in which it is made manifest.