expunerii

Expunerii is a neologism used in speculative discussions of attention and consciousness to designate a proposed class of cognitive processes that determine what sensory input becomes part of conscious experience. The term is not part of established empirical psychology or neuroscience, but appears in philosophical essays and thought experiments about how stimuli are selected for exposure to awareness.

Etymology and attestation are informal; the word seems to be formed from Latin roots related to exposure or placing and is found in scattered online writings dating from the early 2020s. Because it is not widely adopted or rigorously defined, its exact meaning, scope, and disciplinary boundaries vary across sources.

Conceptually, expunerii is invoked to analyze the mechanisms by which the brain filters, gates, and allocates attention to environmental information. Proponents use it to distinguish the process of exposure—what information enters conscious processing—from downstream stages such as encoding or retrieval. In this view, expunerii interacts with prior expectations, context, and prior experience to shape which stimuli are experienced directly and which are suppressed or ignored.

Reception of the term is mixed. Supporters see expunerii as a useful focal point for examining how conscious content is curated, potentially guiding future theories of attention and perceptual access. Critics argue that the term is underdefined, risks overlap with established concepts like selective attention and sensory gating, and lacks empirical operationalization.

See also: Attention, consciousness, selective attention, perceptual load, working memory.