I think you're probably right, but I just wanted to check on the interpretation of this piece of evidence...

In the monkey experiment, how do we know that the differences are due to attention as opposed to just being a direct result of the altered reward condition?

If I had a pattern matching circuit that was driven by reinforcement learning, I would expect it to do nothing meaningful if it was rewarded randomly, and I'd expect it to get better at matching patterns if it gets rewarded when it matches them correctly. Do we even need a notion of "attention" here?

I think the CBT and meditation examples are more convincing to me as with those it's the attention itself that's the variable under control.