Consciousness, Attention, and Conscious Attention Consciousness, Attention, and Conscious Attention Carlos Montemayor and Harry Haroutioun Haladjian The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] This book was set in Stone by the MIT Press. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Montemayor, Carlos. Consciousness, attention, and conscious attention / Carlos Montemayor and Harry Haroutioun Haladjian. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-02897-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Consciousness. 2. Attention. I. Haladjian, Harry Haroutioun, 1973– II. Title. BF311.M595 2015 153.7'33—dc23 2014034378 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Preface vii Acknowledgments xiii 1 Introduction 1 2 Forms of Attention 25 3 Forms of Consciousness 85 4 Conscious Attention 141 5 Consciousness–Attention Dissociation and the Evolution of Conscious Attention 177 Notes 217 Glossary 229 References 235 Index 275 Preface In any type of mental activity, a person selects and analyzes various forms of information. Out of many possible color experiences, you see a specific set of highly unique color shades at any given time; out of many possible beliefs and desires, only a concrete subset of beliefs and desires leads you to act at any given moment. This process of selection, which is highly contex- tual, is responsible for determining the contents that your mind presents to you, in different varieties of mental states, from perception and dreams to inferential reasoning and beliefs about your past and future. In some of these activities, rules and routines direct your attention to certain contents, such as when you look at a work of art from different angles and distances in order to fully appreciate its aesthetic details, or when you follow step by step someone’s train of thought in order to understand their intricate argument. In other cases, salient features of aspects of the world grab your attention, accompanied by memories or emotions you may have at that time, such as when you see a funnel-web spider near your foot and intense fear freezes you into inaction, or when a bright red light in the darkness captures your attention. The more varied are the modes and perspectives you can take in select- ing information, the richer the contents and implications of these selective processes will be. For example, to use the language of phenomenology: if you are capable of varying the procedures, perspectives, and contents you engage, you can take a more transcendental perspective and “bracket” your responses to and interpretations of your natural reactions to these contents, in order to focus your attention on how they appear to you. These contents include the manner in which your own perspective as a self appears to you. Such a process of focusing on how contents appear in your conscious viii Preface awareness is basic in any exercise in which the focus of your attention is on how your experience is presented or given to you, such as in meditation. The selection of highly specific and integrated contents, which may be voluntary or involuntary, is typical of conscious awareness. Since in all these mental activities of selection, focusing, and orientation you seem to be attending to different contents, it is tempting to stipulate that conscious- ness is the same as attention; attention seems to specify what conscious awareness is, or alternatively, all cases of attention are cases of conscious attention. This book challenges that intuitive idea. The empirical evidence and a careful analysis of philosophical and theoretical considerations reveal that in many circumstances attention is dissociated from consciousness. We do not deny, however, that the changes in attention just mentioned are characteristic of conscious awareness. In fact, we propose that the focus- ing of attention on the highly specific contents of awareness—and its richly varied results—depend on the overlap between consciousness and atten- tion. This overlap, conscious attention, is involved in the intricate ways in which one guides and connects the contents of experience associated with phenomenology. By contrast, unconscious attention is fundamental in selection processes that structure basic features of perceptual scenes and representational frameworks at the earliest stages of information process- ing. While unconscious attention implicitly informs conscious attention, it occurs without our being aware of such processes. Metaphorically speaking, if attention is a collection of context-dependent preprogrammed instruc- tions to focus and refocus the mechanism responsible for the selection of information, or a collection of principles for the selection of information, consciousness seems to be independent of any set of such instructions or principles. More specifically, while attention operates by selecting and ana- lyzing, consciousness operates by integrating and unifying. This book will explain such differences between consciousness and attention, while also elaborating on the theoretical implications of their dissociation. An important and related idea we develop is that attention is deeply associated with epistemic processes (i.e., cognitive processes that lead to knowledge of facts), while consciousness is deeply associated with more social processes such as empathy. Conscious awareness helps us appreci- ate the experiences of others. We explain why this way of understanding attention and consciousness is implicitly assumed in many extant views on these topics. Our arguments elucidate the multiple ways in which epistemic Preface ix processes interact with consciousness, producing the great variety of con- scious awareness that human beings enjoy. Unlike most contemporary analyses of consciousness, which focus mainly on perception, we also apply our theoretical approach to memory and expertise. These applications are particularly insightful because they illustrate the validity and generality of the dissociation between conscious- ness and attention. With respect to memory, we show how this dissociation helps explain that memories are important—not only because they afford reliable information about the past, but also because of what they evoke in us. With respect to expertise, we explain how this dissociation operates in situations in which one performs a very challenging task that one is well trained to do: the experience of performing such tasks, in spite of the chal- lenging informational demands, is one of pleasant selflessness without the effortful attention that seemed necessary when first learning to perform such tasks (e.g., playing a musical instrument). The empirical evidence and the theoretical views on attention reveal, moreover, that its dissociation from consciousness can partly be accounted for due to the great variety of attentional processes that occur at different levels of information processing, from basic feature detection to face recog- nition and expertise. These different forms of attention, we argue, are likely to have evolved at different times. Dissociation is a natural way of under- standing the evolutionary gradation of attention, from strictly selective and automatic processes to complex crossmodal, voluntary, and semanti- cally driven effortful attention. Furthermore, just as there is a gradation of attention, so there is a gradation of consciousness, from basic forms of awareness, like experiencing pain and hunger, to reflective forms of self- awareness, such as the desire, after receiving bad news, to believe that the information just learned is false. There is a rich variety of ways in which we attend to and become con- sciously aware of information, and such variety is best understood in terms of the dissociation we propose. The varieties of attention have been stud- ied extensively by cognitive psychologists and have led some of them to conclude that attention cannot be a single phenomenon. Consciousness, too, has often been dismissed by psychologists and philosophers as a broad phenomenon that may not correspond to a single kind of process. While we agree that one should not use the terms ‘consciousness’ or ‘attention’ without qualification, we disagree with such skepticism. We believe that