differences between attention and introspection
Attention is an amazingly plastic capacity, but one may argue that our common-sense, metaphor-driven understanding of attention does not accurately map onto what is really going on in our minds.
Dubious phenomenon of mental perception involved in a literal account of introspection, attention is a real identifiable phenomenon that we can both experience and empirically investigate, there is no identifiable perceptual mechanism but there are areas in the brain that can be associated with attention, and there are data that illustrate a variety of attentive processes in human cognition.
Rather than gathering information from determinable objects, as is the case with perception, attention is involved in processing already existing information in one’s cognitive economy.