Article: Intention – Salience – Attention – Metacognition
About metacognition and its relation to SCRUM Agile
📘 Summary: Intention – Salience – Attention – Metacognition
This article is about metacognition and its relation to SCRUM Agile. It explains the concepts of intention, salience, attention, and metacognition, and how they work together in the context of learning and cognitive processes.
1 Intention – Salience – Attention – Metacognition
- Intention
Intention is the deep direction. It answers: Why am I here? What am I trying to do, become, or protect?
- Salience
Salience is what stands out and pulls the mind. It answers: What feels important, urgent, meaningful, threatening, or attractive right now?
- Attention
Attention is the act of orienting and sustaining focus. It answers: Where is my mind pointed? What am I holding in the foreground?
- Metacognition
Metacognition is the supervisory layer. It answers: Is this focus valid, useful, coherent, and emotionally clean enough to continue?
1.1 How they work together
- Intention sets the direction.
- Salience selects what rises to awareness.
- Attention chooses and holds the current window.
- Metacognition checks for error, bias, emotional distortion, and strategic mismatch.
Attention questions
Attention implicitly asks:
- What am I looking at?
- Where in the problem am I?
- How detailed should I be?
- How long should I stay here?
- Which mode should I use now?
- Should I narrow, broaden, persist, or switch?
Metacognitive questions
Metacognition asks:
- Is that the right target?
- Am I missing something?
- Is this mode helping or trapping me?
- Am I being biased by fear, pride, fatigue, or habit?
- Do I need correction, rest, or a new frame?
1.2 Relation to left/right style hemispheres
The left-style mode tends to favor precision, extraction, categorization, and control. The right-style mode tends to favor context, relation, ambiguity tolerance, and holistic grasp.
Metacognition can supervise both:
- You are over-narrowing.
- You are being too vague.
- You are forcing closure.
- You need more context.
- You need more structure.
- You are stuck in analysis.
- You are drifting without constraint.
1.3 Summary
- Intention: why.
- Salience: what stands out.
- Attention: what is held.
- Metacognition: whether the whole process is sound.
- Lateralization: how you zoom in/out the focus