{
  "id": "focus.attention",
  "term": "focus",
  "sense": "attention",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 4,
  "arena": "cognition",
  "domain": "everyday",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "the part of a thing that is at its center",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "part.relation",
      "center.location"
    ],
    "interaction": "the part that is at the center of a thing becomes the point that draws attention",
    "novel_properties": [
      "central point of interest",
      "point of attention"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "The Hubble Space Telescope kept its mirror aligned to within nanometers despite temperature swings in low Earth orbit.",
      "domain": "engineering"
    },
    {
      "text": "Neurons in the visual cortex fire most intensely when a person looks directly at the center of a scene.",
      "domain": "biology"
    },
    {
      "text": "During the 2020 U.S. election, media coverage concentrated on Pennsylvania, ignoring shifts in New Mexico.",
      "domain": "institutions"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "center.location",
      "type": "is-a",
      "note": "focus is a kind of center"
    },
    {
      "id": "part.relation",
      "type": "abstracts",
      "note": "focus abstracts a part"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [
    "missing-the-forest-for-the-trees.abstraction"
  ],
  "forms": [
    "focus",
    "focused",
    "focuses",
    "focusing"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "openrouter:openai/gpt-oss-120b",
    "date": "2026-07-29",
    "confidence": 0.6
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-focus.attention"
}