Attention and Consciousness
Can there be unconscious attention?
(How would we know?)
The "refrigerator light illusion"
"It seems to be always on. You open the refrigerator: it’s on. You close the refrigerator, and then open it again to check, the light’s still on. It seems like it’s on all the time! Similarly, the visual field seems to be continually present, because the slightest flick of the eye, or of attention, renders it visible." (O'Regan and Noe, 2001, p. 946)
"Blindsighted" patient GY
- Lacked conscious visual awareness of objects in the right half of his visual field.
- However, he could still describe stimuli in the "blind" field when asked to guess about them.
- (Other such patients are able to act on things they don't consciously see.)
Attention without consciousness
- Further testing of GY revealed that his reports on objects in his blind field demonstrated the standard costs and benefits of spatial cueing.
- I.e., validly cued objects were reported more quickly, etc.
- If we accept that these tests reveal the presence of visual attention, then it seems that it can be unconscious.
How does attention affect consciousness?
(Does it have a "distinctive phenomenology"?)
William James
"Every artist knows how he can make a scene before his eyes appear warmer or colder in color, according to the way he sets his attention. If for warm, he soon begins to see the red color start out of everything; if for cold, the blue. Similarly in listening for certain notes in a chord, or overtones in a musical sound, the one we attend to probably sounds a little more loud as well as more emphatic than it did before."
