I disagree, although I’m not at all certain.
The cortex might generate commands (attention / behavior) for purposes of comprehension only. Those commands are sometimes constrained by decisions, but they don’t involve decisions, they just do whatever reduces ambiguity. We constantly try to comprehend the world (or our inner world), with attention and some behaviors, even without motives.
I think most attention is really about anchoring locations, not filtering information (based on L5 stuff I’ve talked about a lot). It ends up filtering info which doesn’t make sense with the spatial system, but that’s just a side effect (not identifying patterns). If the cortex is all about locations, that attention is a cortical thing.
Anchoring locations accounts for attention based on object identity, because each object has its own spatial system. Sensory info from other objects doesn’t fit that spatial system, so it’s not really recognized.
What about attention to part of the sensor? That might seem like a filter, making attention not so cortical.
I think attention isn’t really a filter. It’s easy to attend part of the retina, but what about part of the cochlea? Good luck attending one frequency while hearing a sound.
We can pay attention to a fingertip, but that’s not a filter either. It’s attention to part of the body, so it’s about egocentric location. It’s not attention to part of the sensory array, it’s to the body part, because we can’t perceive things somatotopically. Filtering that info wouldn’t work because it doesn’t exist. Try recognizing the raw sensory input on a fingertip, rather than the shape of the feature invariant to all the deformations on the skin. We can only figure out the raw sensory input by using abstract thoughts
In the case of vision, we can do retinotopic attention, but that’s because we need a line of sight spatial system. There’s no such thing as line of sight for touch or hearing, whereas in vision, two things can occupy the same line-of-sight location, blocking one. That’d be confusing without a concept of line of sight, but luckily we have some visual regions for 2d. That spatial system just happens to be retinotopic, but we might learn it with generic mechanisms rather than deriving it from which parts of the retina activate which parts of the cortical sheet.