Abstract

This article proposes an ecosemiotic model of animal attention as a conceptual framework for understanding how organisms perceive, interpret, and adapt within dynamic environments. Attention is approached not as a passive filter but as a semiotic and relational process that shapes the construction of meaning, organizes behavior, and links organisms to their ecological surroundings. Drawing on biosemiotics, animal cognition, and environmental humanities, the article conceptualizes attention as semiotic scaffolding, which is a dynamic system that integrates internal states, perceptual cues, learned schemas, and environmental affordances. The model is grounded in the distinction between Umwelt and environment and explores how attention contributes to the formation, maintenance, and transformation of subjective worlds. Through detailed theoretical analysis and empirical examples from urban ecology, the article examines how attention operates across individual and multispecies scales, enabling adaptation, creativity, and ecological participation. It also considers how rapid environmental change can disrupt attentional patterns, leading to failure or innovation. Attention is shown to mediate between habit and novelty, stability and reorganization, and to play a vital role in shaping the ecosemiosphere. The study offers new insights into the meaning-making capacities of animals and highlights the relevance of attentional processes for ecological resilience and multispecies coexistence.