According to commonsense psychology, one is conscious of everything that one pays attention to, but one does not pay attention to all the things that one is conscious of. Recent lines of research purport to show that commonsense is mistaken on both of these points: Mack and Rock (1998) tell us that attention is necessary for consciousness, while Kentridge and Heywood (2001) claim that consciousness is not necessary for attention. If these lines of research were successful (...) they would have important implications regarding the prospects of using attention research to inform us about consciousness. The present essay shows that these lines of research are not successful, and that the commonsense picture of the relationship between attention and consciousness can be. (shrink)

An important topic in the ethics of technology is the extent to which recent digital technologies undermine user autonomy. Supporting evidence includes the fact that recent digital technologies are known to have an impact on attention, which balances "bottom-up" and "top-down" influences on cognition. As described in numerous papers, these technologies manipulate bottom-up influences through cognitive fluency, intermittent variable rewards, and other techniques, making them more attractive to the user. We further reason that recent digital technologies reduce the user’s (...) ability to exert top-down attention due to the scale of the content—they provide far more content at a much faster pace than other technologies, which over time reweights the balance of attention in favor of bottom-up influences. After reviewing evidence for these effects, including their temporal duration, we consider their downstream effects on both autonomy and creativity. We find that while the impact of recent digital technologies on top-down attention may allow for more idea generation, that creativity also depends on control, which is undermined by these technologies. We are more circumspect with autonomy, reasoning that in certain cases it might not make sense to see user autonomy as harmed through these effects. We conclude with other ways that recent digital technologies may improve creativity, which may act as an offset to the detrimental impacts of these technologies. (shrink)

F. Brencio (2023), Embodied Attention. A phenomenological hypothesis, in D. Stoyanov (Ed.), Contemporary Neuropsychiatry: Implications from Cognitive Neuroscience, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Cambridge, pp. 26-42.

We provide empirical examples to conceptually clarify some items on Firestone & Scholl’s (F&S’s) checklist, and to explain perceptual effects from an attentional and memory perspective. We also note that action and embodied cognition studies seem to be most susceptible to misattributing attentional and memory effects as perceptual, and identify four characteristics unique to action studies and possibly responsible for misattributions.

Joint attention customarily refers to the coordinated focus of attention between two or more individuals on a common object or event, where it is mutually “open” to all attenders that they are so engaged. We identify two broad approaches to analyse joint attention, one in terms of cognitive notions like common knowledge and common awareness, and one according to which joint attention is fundamentally a primitive phenomenon of sensory experience. John Campbell’s relational theory is a prominent (...) representative of the latter approach, and the main focus of this paper. We argue that Campbell’s theory is problematic for a variety of reasons, through which runs a common thread: most of the problems that the theory is faced with arise from the relational view of perception that he endorses, and, more generally, they suggest that perceptual experience is not sufficient for an analysis of joint attention. (shrink)

For many years there has been a debate about the role of the parietal lobe in the generation of behavior. Does it generate movement plans (intention) or choose objects in the environment for further processing? To answer this, we focus on the lateral intraparietal area (LIP), an area that has been shown to play independent roles in target selection for saccades and the generation of visual attention. Based on results from a variety of tasks, we propose that LIP acts (...) as a priority map in which objects are represented by activity proportional to their behavioral priority. We present evidence to show that the priority map combines bottom-up inputs like a rapid visual response with an array of top-down signals like a saccade plan. The spatial location representing the peak of the map is used by the oculomotor system to target saccades and by the visual system to guide visual attention. (shrink)

According to the attentional resources account, mind wandering (or “task-unrelated thought”) is thought to compete with a focal task for attentional resources. Here, we tested two key predictions of this account: First, that mind wandering should not interfere with performance on a task that does not require attentional resources; second, that as task requirements become automatized, performance should improve and depth of mind wandering should increase. Here, we used a serial reaction time task with implicit- and explicit-learning groups to test (...) these predictions. Providing novel evidence for the attentional resource account’s first prediction, results indicated that depth of mind wandering was negatively associated with learning in the explicit, but not the implicit, group, indicating that mind wandering is associated with impaired explicit, but not implicit, learning. Corroborating the attention resource account’s second prediction, we also found that, overall, performance improved while at the same time depth of mind wandering increased. From an implicit learning perspective, these results are consistent with the claim that explicit learning is impaired under attentional load, but implicit learning is not. (shrink)

From playing basketball to ordering at a food counter, we frequently and effortlessly coordinate our attention with others towards a common focus: we look at the ball, or point at a piece of cake. This non-verbal coordination of attention plays a fundamental role in our social lives: it ensures that we refer to the same object, develop a shared language, understand each other’s mental states, and coordinate our actions. Models of joint attention generally attribute this accomplishment to (...) gaze coordination. But are visual attentional mechanisms sufficient to achieve joint attention, in all cases? Besides cases where visual information is missing, we show how combining it with other senses can be helpful, and even necessary to certain uses of joint attention. We explain the two ways in which non-visual cues contribute to joint attention: either as enhancers, when they complement gaze and pointing gestures in order to coordinate joint attention on visible objects, or as modality pointers, when joint attention needs to be shifted away from the whole object to one of its properties, say weight or texture. This multisensory approach to joint attention has important implications for social robotics, clinical diagnostics, pedagogy and theoretical debates on the construction of a shared world. (shrink)

We discuss the rational role of highly inattentive experiences, and argue that they can provide rational support for beliefs.

The term attention has been used to mean so many different things that some have despaired of it being useful at all. This paper is devoted to bringing a modicum of order to the chaos through the time-honored device of categorization. The chief purpose of this paper is to introduce a comprehensive descriptive taxonomy of the nuanced ways the term attention may be employed. It is presented in table form, followed by elucidations and illustrations of each of its (...) items. But first, I offer reasons why a taxonomy of attention is needed and explore some of its possible benefits. After presenting the taxonomy, I sketch by way of example how it might be applied to two interesting questions: is the umbrella term attention still useful?; and, what is it that ties the subdefinitions of attention together yet distinguishes them from other kinds of cognition? (shrink)

It is an important feature of creatures like us that our various motivations compete for control over our behaviour, including mental behaviour such as imagining and attending. In large part, this competition is adjudicated by the stimulation of affect — the intrinsically pleasant or unpleasant aspects of experience. In this paper I argue that the motivation-affect system controls a sub-type of attention called 'alerting attention' to bring various goals and stimuli to consciousness and thereby prioritize those contents for (...) action. This view allows me to flesh out the global workspace theory of consciousness, as well as some of the phenomenal characteristics of conscious experience. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate the role of intention and joint attention in joint actions. Depending on the shared intentions the agents have, we distinguish between joint path-goal actions and joint final-goal actions. We propose an instrumental account of basic joint action analogous to a concept of basic action and argue that intentional joint attention is a basic joint action. Furthermore, we discuss the functional role of intentional joint attention for successful cooperation in complex joint actions. Anika (...) Fiebich is PhD student in Philosophy at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. Shaun Gallagher is Lilian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, USA. (shrink)

Recent advances in our understanding of visual perception have shown it to be a far more complex and counterintuitive process than previously believed. Several important consequences follow from this. First, the design of an effective statistical graphics system is unlikely to succeed based on intuition alone; instead, it must rely on a more sophisticated, systematic approach. The basic elements of such an approach are outlined here, along with several design principles. An overview is then given of recent advances in our (...) understanding of visual perception, including rapid perception, visual attention, and scene perception. It then is argued that the mechanisms involved can be successfully harnessed to allow data to be displayed more effectively than at present. Several directions of development are discussed, including effective use of visual attention, the display of dynamic information, and the effective use of nonattentional and nonconscious perceptual systems. (shrink)

Jonardon Ganeri presents a radically reoriented account of mind, to which attention is the key. It is attention, not self, that explains the experiential and normative situatedness of humans in the world. Ganeri draws together three disciplines: analytic philosophy and phenomenology, cognitive science and psychology, and Buddhist thought.

I argue that perceptual content is always affected by the allocation of one’s attention. Perception attributes determinable and determinate properties to the perceived scene. Attention makes (or tries to make) our perceptual attribution of properties more determinate. Hence, a change in our attention changes the determinacy of the properties attributed to the perceived scene.

The predictive coding (PC) theory of attention identifies attention with the optimization of the precision weighting of prediction error. Here we provide some challenges for this identification. On the one hand, the precision weighting of prediction error is too broad a phenomenon to be identified with attention because such weighting plays a central role in multimodal integration. Cases of crossmodal illusions such as the rubber hand illusion and the McGurk effect involve the differential precision weighting of prediction (...) error, yet attention does not shift as one would predict. On the other hand, the precision weighting of prediction error is too narrow a phenomenon to be identified with attention, because it cannot accommodate the full range of attentional phenomena. We review criticisms that PC cannot account for volitional attention and affect-biased attention, and we propose that it may not be able to account for feature-based and intellectual attention. (shrink)

This chapter argues that attention is a distinctive mode of consciousness, which plays an essential functional role in making information accessible for use in the rational control of thought and action. The main line of argument can be stated quite simply. Attention is what makes information fully accessible for use in the rational control of thought and action. But what makes information fully accessible for use in the rational control of thought and action is a distinctive mode of (...) consciousness. Therefore, attention is a distinctive mode of consciousness. In a slogan: attention is rational-access consciousness. (shrink)

The topic of this paper is the complex interaction between attention, fixation, and one species of change blindness. The two main interpretations of the target phenomenon are the ‘blindness’ interpretation and the ‘inaccessibility’ interpretation. These correspond to the sparse view (Dennett 1991; Tye, 2007) and the rich view (Dretske 2007; Block, 2007a, 2007b) of visual consciousness respectively. Here I focus on the debate between Fred Dretske and Michael Tye. Section 1 describes the target phenomenon and the dialectics it entails. (...) Section 2 explains how attention and fixation weigh in these debates, and argues that Dretske’s hyper-rich view fails precisely because he overlooks certain effects of attention and fixation. Section 3 explains why Tye’s view is also unsatisfying, mainly because he misconceives the degree of access. Section 4 then puts forward the positive model covariance, which has it that the degree of cognitive access tracks the degree of phenomenology, and contrasts it with Block’s view on the Sperling iconic memory paradigm. The paper ends with a discussion of levels of seeing, which involve crowding, indexing, and other visual phenomena. Change ‘blindness’ is a set of phenomena that was discovered about two decades ago, yet an entirely satisfying understanding is still lacking. To move forward, a more detailed understanding of attention and fixation is called for. (shrink)

Joint attention occurs when two (or more) individuals attend together to some object. It has been identified by psychologists as an early form of our joint engagement, and is thought to provide us with an understanding of other minds that is basic in that sophisticated conceptual resources are not involved. Accordingly, it has also attracted the interest of philosophers. Moreover, a very recent trend in the psychological and philosophical literature on joint attention consists of developing the suggestion that (...) it holds partially in virtue of communication: it is because we share our thoughts or feelings about an object that our individual attention becomes joint. This paper unpacks the communicative suggestion in a way that accounts for joint attention's basicness. (shrink)

Root, branch, and blossom, attention is intertwined with epistemology. It is essential to our capacity to learn and decisive of the evidence we obtain, it influences the intellectual connections we forge and those we remember, and it is the cognitive tool whereby we enact decisions about inquiry. Moreover, because it is both an epistemic practice and a site of agency, attention is a natural locus for questions about epistemic morality. This article surveys the emerging epistemology of attention, (...) reviewing the existing literature and sketching avenues for future investigation. It also argues for a reorientation of epistemology itself. This argument is the focus of Section 1. Section 2 briefly reviews philosophical accounts of attention, Section 3 focuses on issues in traditional, individualistic epistemology, and Section 4 turns to social epistemology. (shrink)

One sceptical rejoinder to those who claim that sensory perception is cognitively penetrable is to appeal to the involvement of attention. So, while a phenomenon might initially look like one where, say, a perceiver’s beliefs are influencing her visual experience, another interpretation is that because the perceiver believes and desires as she does, she consequently shifts her spatial attention so as to change what she senses visually. But, the sceptic will urge, this is an entirely familiar phenomenon, and (...) it hardly involves some special or theoretically important cognitive effect on sensory perception. Even supposing that the sceptic is correct about cases that are accurately described in this way, the rejoinder oversimplifies the possible roles that attention may play in mediating cognition and perception. This paper aims to identify these different roles, and by emphasis on empirical research on feature-based and object-based attention. What emerges is a plausible and well- evidenced mental schema that describes attention -mediated cognitive penetration. At the very least, the burden of proof is shifted to the sceptic, as he then must show that there are no mental phenomena involving attention in the more nuanced ways described here. One additional benefit of this analysis is that it illuminates various features of attention and its relation to both cognition and phenomenal consciousness. Therefore the analysis should be of interest to a broad range of theorists of the mind, and not just those invested in the cognitive penetration debate. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to give a new account of the way we exercise our attention in some paradigmatic cases of aesthetic experience. I treat aesthetic experience as a specific kind of experience and like in the case of other kinds of experiences, attention plays an important role in determining its phenomenal character. I argue that an important feature of at least some of our aesthetic experiences is that we exercise our attention in a specific, (...) distributed, manner: our attention is focused on one perceptual object, but it is distributed among the various properties of this object. I argue that this way of exercising one’s attention is very different from the way we attend most of the time and it fits very well with some important features of paradigmatic examples of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

Theories of phenomenal intentionality have been claimed to resolve certain worries about the indeterminacy of mental content that rival, externalist theories face. Thus far, however, such claims have been largely programmatic. This paper aims to improve on prior arguments in favor of phenomenal intentionality by using attention and Gestalt principles as specific examples of factors that influence the phenomenal character of perceptual experience in ways that thereby help determine perceptual content. Some reasons are then offered for rejecting an alternative (...) interpretation of these examples, according to which the phenomenal effects of attention and Gestalt principles play no role in the determination of perceptual content. (shrink)

This paper contrasts individual and collective listening to music, with particular regard to the expressive qualities of music. In the first half of the paper a general model of joint attention is introduced. According to this model, perceiving together modifies the intrinsic structure of the perceptual task, and encourages a convergence of responses to a greater or lesser degree. The model is then applied to music, looking first at the silent listening situation typical to the classical concert hall, and (...) second the noisy listening situation typical to rock or jazz concerts. (shrink)

Can one pay attention to objects without being conscious of them? Some years ago there was evidence that had been taken to show that the answer is 'yes'. That evidence was inconclusive, but there is recent work that makes the case more compellingly: it now seems that it is indeed possible to pay attention to objects of which one is not conscious. This is bad news for theories in which the connection between attention and consciousness is taken (...) to be an essential one. It is good news for theories (including mine) in which the connection between attention and agency is taken to be essential. (shrink)

In this paper I criticize theory-biased and overly individualist approaches to understanding others and introduce the PAIR account of joint attention as a pragmatic, affectively charged intentional relation. I argue that this relation obtains in virtue of intentional contents in the minds of the co-attenders, and – against the received understanding of intentional states as propositional attitudes – that we should recognize what I call “subject mode” and “position mode” intentional content. Based on findings from developmental psychology, I propose (...) that subject mode content represents the co-attenders as co-subjects, who are like them and who are at least disposed to act jointly with them. I conclude by arguing that in joint attention we experience and understand affective, actional and perceptual relations at a non-conceptual level prior to the differentiation of mind and body. (shrink)

This article states that research in skill acquisitionand executionhas underestimated the relevance of some features of attention. We present and theoretically discuss two essential features of attention that have been systematically overlooked in the research of skill acquisitionandexecution. First, attention alters the appearance of the perceived stimuli in an essential way; and second, attention plays a fundamental role in action, being crucial for solving the so called ’many-many problem’, that is to say, the problem of generating (...) a coherent behavior byselecting between many inputs and many potential outputs. We discuss the importance of these features for skill acquisition in sport. We also suggest empirical ways to assess the precise impact of taking them into consideration and at the same time we propose important implications for training derived from the ideas discussed in the paper. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to develop and defend an Attentional View of bodily awareness, on which attention is necessary for bodily awareness. The original formulation of the Attentional View is due to Marcel Kinsbourne. First, I will show that the Attentional View of bodily awareness as formulated by Kinsbourne is superior to other accounts in the literature for characterizing the relationship between attention and bodily awareness. Kinsbourne’s account is the only account in the literature so far (...) which can accommodate key neurological diseases such as personal neglect. Second, when I consider Kinsbourne’s view in more detail, I will argue that Kinsbourne’s Attentional View faces problems because it is too reductive. Kinsbourne deviates from the standard taxonomy on which there is a body schema and a body image. Instead he reduces the body image to the neural representation of the body in the somatosensory cortex, the body schema and attentional shifts. I will present two challenges to Kinsbourne’s view which demonstrate that Kinsbourne’s reduction of the body image is unsuccessful. Finally, I will present a revised version of the Attentional View that is both empirically adequate and philosophically satisfactory. (shrink)

It has been argued that the explanation of self-control requires positing special motivational powers. Some think that we need will-power as an irreducible mental faculty; others that we need to think of the active self as a dedicated and depletable pool of psychic energy or – in today more respectable terminology – mental resources; finally, there is the idea that self-control requires postulating a deep division between reason and passion – a deliberative and an emotional motivational system. This essay argues (...) that no such special motivational powers are necessary. Yet, at the same time, self-control does powerfully illustrate the importance of a feature of the mind. What it illustrates, I argue, is the importance of the mental activity of attention in the control of all action. It is by appeal to this mental activity that we can dispense with special motivational powers. If we think of Humeanism as the view that there is fundamentally only one kind of motivational system and that all action is based in that system, then this essay contributes to a defense of Humeanism. On the other hand, the essay also shows that any model of agency in terms of only beliefs and desires, motivational and representational states, or preferences and credences is incomplete. A different conception of Humeanism as the view that every mental state is either motivational, representational, or a combination of them, is false. (shrink)

Commentary on Andy Clark's target article on predictive coding.

The harmonious free play of the imagination and understanding is at the heart of Kant’s account of beauty in the Critique of the Power of Judgement, but interpreters have long struggled to determine what Kant means when he claims the faculties are in a state of free play. In this article, I develop an interpretation of the free play of the faculties in terms of the freedom of attention. By appealing to the different way that we attend to objects (...) in aesthetic experience, we can explain how the faculties are free, even when the subject already possesses a concept of the object and is bound to the determinate form of the object in perception. (shrink)

In this paper I outline the PAIR account of joint attention as a perceptual-practical, affectively charged intentional relation. I argue that to explain joint attention we need to leave the received understanding of propositions and propositional attitudes and the picture of content connected to it behind and embrace the notions of subject mode and position mode content. I also explore the relation between joint attention and communication.

Intentional communication is perceptually based and about attentional objects. Three attention mechanisms are distinguished: scanning, attention attraction, and attention-focusing. Attention-focusing directs the subject towards attentional objects. Attention-focusing is goal-governed (controlled by stimulus) or goal-intended (under the control of the subject). Attentional objects are perceptually categorised functional entities that emerge in the interaction between subjects and environment. Joint attention allows for focusing on the same attentional object simultaneously (mutual object-focused attention), provided that the subjects (...) have focused on each other beforehand (subject-subject attention). It results in intentional communication if the subjects attend to each other as subjects (i) capable of attending, and (ii) attending in a goal-intended way. Intentional communication is fundamentally imperative and adapted to action. (shrink)

We argue that recent empirical findings and theoretical models shed new light on the nature of attention. According to the resulting amplification view, attentional phenomena can be unified at the neural level as the consequence of the amplification of certain input signals of attention-independent perceptual computations. This way of identifying the core realizer of attention evades standard criticisms often raised against sub-personal accounts of attention. Moreover, this approach also reframes our thinking about the function of (...) class='Hi'>attention by shifting the focus from the function of selection to the function of amplification. (shrink)

The role of conscious attention in language processing has been scarcely considered, despite the wide-spread assumption that verbal utterances manage to attract and manipulate the addressee’s attention. Here I claim that this assumption is to be understood not as a figure of speech but instead in terms of attentional processes proper. This hypothesis can explain a fact that has been noticed by supporters of Relevance Theory in pragmatics: the special role played by speaker-related information in utterance interpretation. I (...) argue that representation of the speaker in working memory reliably enhances the activation of speaker-related information and, consequently, the role it plays in determining the content of interpretations. (shrink)

Some have argued that a subject has an inner awareness of its conscious mental states by virtue of the non-introspective, reflexive awareness that any conscious state has of itself. But, what exactly is it like to have a ubiquitous and reflexive inner awareness of one’s conscious states, as distinct from one’s outer awareness of the apparent world? This essay derives a model of ubiquitous inner awareness (UIA) from Sebastian Watzl’s recent theory of attention as the activity of structuring consciousness (...) into an experiential center and periphery. I develop Watzl’s theory into an account of UIA by suggesting that a subject is acquainted with its own conscious mental states through being reflexively aware of how these states are structured by attention into a unified subjective perspective. I favorably compare this Watzl-inspired account of UIA against other contemporary analytic and classical Buddhist accounts of reflexive awareness and subjective character, which variously ground the inner awareness of conscious states on their intrinsic phenomenal quality of “for-me-ness,” their affective/hedonic valence, or a subject’s disposition to introspect them. The Watzl-inspired account also accommodates possible counter-examples to Watzl’s theory posed by states of minimal phenomenal experience such as lucid dreamless sleep and non-dual meditative awareness. (shrink)

This article discusses several key issues concerning the study of attention and its relation to visual perception, with an emphasis on behavioral and experiential aspects. It begins with an overview of several classical works carried out in the latter half of the 20th century, such as the development of early filter and spotlight models of attention. This is followed by a survey of subsequent research that extended or modified these results in significant ways. It covers current work on (...) various forms of induced blindness and on the capabilities of nonattentional processes. It also includes proposals about how a "just-in-time" allocation of attention can create the impression that we see our surroundings in coherent detail everywhere, as well as how the failure of such allocation can result in various perceptual deficits. The final section examines issues that have received little consideration to date, but may be important for new lines of research in the near future. These include the prospects for a better characterization of attention, the possibility of more systematic explanations, factors that may significantly modulate attentional operation, and the possibility of several kinds of visual attention and visual experience. (shrink)

I argue first that attention is a (maybe the) paradigmatic case of an object-directed, non-propositional intentional mental episode. In addition attention cannot be reduced to any other (propositional or non-propositional) mental episodes. Yet, second, attention is not a non-propositional mental attitude. It might appear puzzling how one could hold both of these claims. I show how to combine them, and how that combination shows how propositionality and non-propositionality can co-exist in a mental life. The crucial move is (...) one away from an atomistic, building block picture to a more holistic, structural picture. (shrink)

Is it wrong to distract? Is it wrong to direct others’ attention in ways they otherwise would not choose? If so, what are the grounds of this wrong – and, in expounding them, do we have to at once condemn large chunks of contemporary digital commerce (also known as the attention economy)? In what follows, I attempt to cast light on these questions. Specifically, I argue – following the pioneering work of Jasper Tran and Anuj Puri – that (...) there is a right to attention, and that its existence underlies some of our claims regarding the wrongness of distractions. However, I depart from both these authors in two respects: first, I present a new way of deriving the right to attention, grounding it in the more fundamental right to mental integrity. Second, I remain agnostic on whether the contemporary business practices of capturing attention in exchange for a variety of digital products and services are plagued by routine violations of the right. (shrink)

Moral perceptualism is the view that perceptual experience is attuned to pick up on moral features in our environment, just as it is attuned to pick up on mundane features of an environment like textures, shapes, colors, pitches, and timbres. One important family of views that incorporate moral perception are those of virtue theorists and sensibility theorists. On these views, one central ability of the virtuous agent is her sensitivity to morally relevant features of situations, where this sensitivity is often (...) spoken of in perceptual terms. However, sensibility theorists have often not been careful to specify how to understand their claims about moral sensibilities as perceptual. In this paper, we distinguish between what we call Attentional Moral Perception and Contentful Moral Perception. We argue that sensibility theorists should endorse Attentional Moral Perception, because it has very powerful empirical evidence in its favor, and it can play all of the explanatory roles that the sensibility theorist needs in her theory of moral sensibilities. (shrink)

When visual attention is directed away from a stimulus, neural processing is weak and strength and precision of sensory data decreases. From a computational perspective, in such situations observers should give more weight to prior expectations in order to behave optimally during a discrimination task. Here we test a signal detection theoretic model that counter-intuitively predicts subjects will do just the opposite in a discrimination task with two stimuli, one attended and one unattended: when subjects are probed to discriminate (...) the unattended stimulus, they rely less on prior information about the probed stimulus’ identity. The model is in part inspired by recent findings that attention reduces trial-by-trial variability of the neuronal population response and that they use a common criterion for attended and unattended trials. In five different visual discrimination experiments, when attention was directed away from the target stimulus, subjects did not adjust their response bias in reaction to a change in stimulus presentation frequency despite being fully informed and despite the presence of performance feedback and monetary and social incentives. This indicates that subjects did not rely more on the priors under conditions of inattention as would be predicted by a Bayes-optimal observer model. These results inform and constrain future models of Bayesian inference in the human brain. (shrink)

Is attention both necessary and sufficient for consciousness? Call this central question of this treatise, “Q.” We commonly have the experience of consciously paying attention to something, but is it possible to be conscious of something you are not attending to, or to attend to something of which you are not conscious? Where might we find examples of these? This treatise is a quest to find an answer to Q in two parts. Part I reviews the foundations upon (...) which the discourse on Q is built. Different inputs to Q produce different answers. After consideration of the many ways “attention” and “consciousness” have been defined, I settle upon phenomenal consciousness and Executive Attention (defined as a suite of strategies for structuring cognition for further processing implemented by the executive of working memory) as the most interesting inputs to Q, and the ones on which Part II focuses. Attention without consciousness seems relatively easy to establish empirically, but consciousness without attention is much harder. The putative candidates all seem to have major problems, but I build a strong abductive case for the hitherto ignored case of foveal phenomenal overflow. We consciously see far more detail in our foveal fields than we can Executively Attend, although there is a serious obstacle to our ever confirming that empirically—identifying conscious content relies on Executive Attentional report. Triangulating the capacity limitations of attention, consciousness, and working memory strengthens this case for consciousness without attention, and suggests that cognition must work something like my “Witches’ Hat Model,” on which content can become conscious outside of Executive Attention or working memory. I conclude with some reflections on the implications of my arguments for the discourse on Q, and for other discourses such as the ontologies of attention and consciousness, theories of consciousness, some other cognitive concepts, and ethical considerations in humans, animals, and machines. A conclusive answer to Q continues to elude us. It may perhaps be an ultimately insoluble conundrum. But it is the very essence of humanity to seek an answer, and in so doing, to improve our understanding of our own nature: “The proper study of mankind is man.”1. (shrink)

Iris Murdoch held that states of mind and character are of the first moral importance, and that attention to one's states of mind and character are a widespread source of moral failure. Maintaining both of these claims can lead to problems in the account of how one could become good. This paper explains the way in which Murdoch negotiated those problems, focusing, in particular on /The Sovereignty of Good/ and /The Nice and The Good/.

This book presents a comprehensive theoretical framework that explains both human consciousness and meanings through the working of attention. By arguing for a first-person approach to consciousness, this book offers a critical overview of the major theories and empirical findings on consciousness and attention, and exemplifies how one of the most difficult and fundamental conscious experiences to account for, that is, time, can be analyzed by adopting the kind of semantics developed within the presented theoretical framework: Attentional Semantics.

What precisely does a distraction threaten? An agent who spends an inordinate amount of time attending to her smartphone – what precisely is she lacking? I argue that whereas agency of attention is the agent’s non-automatic decision-making on what she currently pays attention to, autonomy of attention is the agent, through her second-order desires, effectively interfering with her non-automatic decision-making on what she currently pays attention to. Freedom of attention is the agent’s possibility to hold (...) or switch her focus of attention without fixating on any specific focus against her will or without distraction from chosen foci. This conceptual work provides resources to track manipulations that diminish a person’s freedom of attention. (shrink)

In the first part of the paper, I’ll rehearse an argument that perceiving that we see and hear isn’t a special case of perception in Aristotle but is rather a necessary condition for any perception whatsoever: the turning of one’s attention to the affection of the sense organs. In the second part of the paper, I’ll consider the thesis that the activity of the active intellect is analogous to perceiving that we see and hear.

As the demand for explainable deep learning grows in the evaluation of language technologies, the value of a principled grounding for those explanations grows as well. Here we study the state-of-the-art in explanation for neural models for natural-language processing (NLP) tasks from the viewpoint of philosophy of science. We focus on recent evaluation work that finds brittleness in explanations obtained through attention mechanisms.We harness philosophical accounts of explanation to suggest broader conclusions from these studies. From this analysis, we assert (...) the impossibility of causal explanations from attention layers over text data. We then introduce NLP researchers to contemporary philosophy of science theories that allow robust yet non-causal reasoning in explanation, giving computer scientists a vocabulary for future research. (shrink)

Selective access and integration underlie much of our visual experience. This article describes several of the experimental techniques used to investigate these processes, and some of the major results achieved in our understanding of their operation.