Definition of "attention"

In the old days, to my commonplace and unobserving mind, he gave no evidences of genius whatsoever. He never read me any of his manuscripts, […], and therefore my lack of detection of his promise may in some degree be pardoned. But he had then none of the oddities and mannerisms which I hold to be inseparable from genius, and which struck my attention in after days when I came in contact with the Celebrity.

1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter I, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd.

One saint's day in mid-term a certain newly appointed suffragan-bishop came to the school chapel, and there preached on “The Inner Life.” He at once secured attention by his informal method, and when presently the coughing of Jarvis […] interrupted the sermon, he altogether captivated his audience with a remark about cough lozenges being cheap and easily procurable.

1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter III, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company

Lesper Killey was at her shoulder, jerking at the wash-faded denim of her jumper to get her attention.

1959, Mari Sandoz, “Bone Joe and the Smokin' Woman”, in Hostiles and Friendlies: Selected Short Writings‎

But was it responsible governance to pass the Longitude Act without other efforts to protect British seamen? Or might it have been subterfuge—a disingenuous attempt to shift attention away from the realities of their life at sea.

2012 March, William E. Carter, Merri Sue Carter, “The British Longitude Act Reconsidered”, in American Scientist‎, volume 100, number 2, page 87

She attended her sickbed; her watchful attentions triumphed over the malignity of the distemper.

1818, [Mary Shelley], chapter 3, in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. […], volumes (please specify |volume=I to III), London: […] [Macdonald and Son] for Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones

For some time past I have been the recipient of very marked attentions from a young lady.

1910, Stephen Leacock, “How to Avoid Getting Married,”, in Literary Lapses

The attention mechanism is an important part of these models and plays a very crucial role. Before Transformer models, the attention mechanism was proposed as a helper for improving conventional DL models such as RNNs.

2021, Savas Yildirim, Meysam Asgari-Chenaghlu, Mastering Transformers […] , Packt Publishing Ltd, page 26