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)

This chapter presents an overview of several recent developments in vision science, and outlines some of their implications for the management of visual attention in graphic displays. These include ways of sending attention to the right item at the right time, techniques to improve attentional efficiency, and possibilities for offloading some of the processing typically done by attention onto nonattentional mechanisms. In addition it is argued that such techniques not only allow more effective use to be made of visual attention, (...) but also open up new possibilities for human-machine interaction. (shrink)

This review essay critically discusses Andre Kukla's Methods of theoretical psychology. It is argued that Kukla mistakenly tries to build his case for theorizing in psychology as a separate discipline on a dubious distinction between theory and observation. He then argues that the demise of empiricism implies a return of some form of rationalism, which entails an autonomous role for theorizing in psychology. Having shown how this theory-observation dichotomy goes back to traditional and largely abandoned ideas in epistemology, an alternative (...) is presented in the guise of the pragmatist or functionalist tradition, where the interdependence of theory, observation and action is emphasized and the positivist dichotomy of pure observations and pure theory is rejected. Furthermore, we show how recent work on "active" perception supports the functionalist approach. Although the authors agree with Kukla that theory has a legitimate place in psychology, it is suggested that he needlessly limits its scope to autonomous domain-neutral theorizing, and that broadening its perspective to analyzing the presuppositions and implications of empirical work is a more fruitful approach. In fact, the attempt to find the epistemological and philosophical implications of empirical work in perception that is sketched in this review essay is, in the authors' view, a case of theorizing in psychology. (shrink)

Change blindness—our inability to detect changes in a stimulus—occurs even when the change takes place gradually, without any disruption [Simons, D. J., Franconeri, S. L., & Reimer, R. L. . Change blindness in the absence of a visual disruption. Perception, 29, 1143–1154]. Such gradual changes are more difficult to detect than changes that involve a disruption. Using this method, David et al. [David, E., Laloyaux, C., Devue, C., & Cleeremans, A. . Change blindness to gradual changes in facial expressions. Psychologica (...) Belgica] recently showed substantial blindness to changes that involve facial expressions of emotion. In this experiment, we show that people who failed to detect any change in the displays were nevertheless influenced by the changing information in subsequent recognition decisions about which facial expression they had seen, and that their confidence in their decisions was lower after exposure to changing vs. static displays. The findings therefore support the notion that undetected changes that occur in highly salient stimuli may be causally efficacious and influence subsequent behavior. Implications concerning the nature of the representations associated with undetected changes are discussed. (shrink)

The goal of this study is to characterize observers’ abilities to discriminate between endogenous and exogenous changes. To do so, we developed a new experimental paradigm. On each trial, participants were shown a dot pattern on the screen. Next, the pattern disappeared and participants were to reproduce it. Changes were surreptuously introduced in the stimulus, either by presenting participants anew with the dot pattern they had themselves produced on the previous trial or by presenting participants with a slightly different dot (...) pattern . We analyzed awareness of the changes and behavioral adaptation to them in a dynamical manner. We observe signal attenuation in the presence of endogenous change, dissociation between self-attribution reports and behavioral effect of agency. We discuss the source of this sensitive attenuation as well as the relation between a minimal or core self and an extended, narrative or autobiographical self. (shrink)

The goal of this study is to characterize observers’ abilities to detect gradual changes and to explore putative dissociations between conscious experience of change and behavioral adaptation to a changing stimulus. We developed a new experimental paradigm in which, on each trial, participants were shown a dot pattern on the screen. Next, the pattern disappeared and participants had to reproduce it. In some conditions, the target pattern was incrementally rotated over successive trials and participants were either informed or not of (...) this change. We analyzed both awareness of the changes and the dynamics of behavioral adaptation, in a way that makes it possible to assess both variability and accuracy as they change over time. Results indicate a dissociation between change awareness and behavioral adaptation to the changes, and support the notion that unconscious representations of visual stimuli are more precise and detailed than previously suggested. We discuss the implications of these results for theories of change detection. (shrink)

Observers have difficulty detecting visual changes. However, they are unaware of this inability, suggesting that people do not have an accurate understanding of visual processes. We explored whether this error is related to participants’ beliefs about the roles of intention and scene complexity in detecting changes. In Experiment 1 participants had a higher failure rate for detecting changes in an incidental change detection task than an intentional change detection task. This effect of intention was greatest for complex scenes. However, participants (...) predicted equal levels of change detection for both types of changes across scene complexity. In Experiment 2, emphasizing the differences between intentional and incidental tasks allowed participants to make predictions that were less inaccurate. In Experiment 3, using more sensitive measures and accounting for individual differences did not further improve predictions. These findings suggest that adults do not fully understand the role of intention and scene complexity in change detection. (shrink)

Mindfulness can be understood as the mental ability to focus on the direct and immediate perception or monitoring of the present moment with a state of open and nonjudgmental awareness. Descriptions of mindfulness and methods for cultivating it originated in eastern spiritual traditions. These suggest that mindfulness can be developed through meditation practice to increase positive qualities such as awareness, insight, wisdom, and compassion. In this article we focus on the relationships between mindfulness, with associated meditation practices, and the cognitive (...) neuroscience of attention and awareness. Mindful awareness is related to distributed attention, phenomenal consciousness, and momentary self-awareness, as characterized by recent findings in cognitive psychology and neuroscience as well as in influential consciousness models. Finally, we outline an integrated neurocognitive model of mindfulness, attention, and awareness, with a key role of prefrontal cortex. (shrink)

The paper presents analysis of form in different domains. It draws on the commonalities and their potential unified classifications based on how forms subjectively appear in perception—as opposed to their standard specification in Euclidean geometry or other objective quantitative methods. The paper provides an overview aiming to offer elements for thought for researchers in various fields.

Besides presenting a phenomenological-experimental analysis of consciousness, Meinong challenged one of the major indisputable axioms of current scientific research, i.e. that perception in awareness has to be veridical on the stimulus. Meinong’s analysis of consciousness, which he conducted through a kind of dissection of its structures from a systematic and an experimental viewpoint, offers relevant insights to contemporary consciousness studies.

Following a previous article published in Biological Theory, in this study we present a mathematical theory for a science of qualities as directly perceived by living organisms, and based on morphological patterns. We address a range of qualitative phenomena as observables of a psychological system seen as an impredicative system. The starting point of our study is the notion that perceptual phenomena are projections of underlying invariants, objects that remain unchanged when transformations of a certain class under consideration are applied. (...) The study develops with the observables, the entailed total order and metric, whence the algebra and the geometry of such a science, presenting a formal phenomenological model for phenomena that are not rigidly Euclidean. We show how non-Euclidean perception can have many useful Euclidean formalizations, as well as locally-homeomorphic-to-Euclidean-space models. The mathematical models we provide are tested on the basis of results from experimental psychology, in particular from the field of color, time, and space perception. (shrink)

People’s awareness of tactile stimuli has been investigated in far less detail than their awareness of stimuli in other sensory modalities. In an attempt to fill this gap, we provide an overview of studies that are pertinent to the topic of tactile consciousness. We discuss the results of research that has investigated phenomena such as “change blindness”, phantom limb sensations, and numerosity judgments in tactile perception, together with the results obtained from the study of patients affected by deficits that can (...) adversely affect tactile perception such as neglect, extinction, and numbsense. The similarities as well as some of the important differences that have emerged when visual and tactile conscious information processing have been compared using similar experimental procedures are highlighted. We suggest that conscious information processing in the tactile modality cannot be separated completely from the more general processing of spatial information in the brain. Finally, the importance of considering tactile consciousness within the larger framework of multisensory information processing is also discussed. (shrink)

Dartnall claims that visual short-term memory stores nonconceptual content , in the form of compressed images. In this paper I argue against the claim that NCC can be stored in VSTM. I offer four reasons why NCC cannot be stored in visual memory and why only conceptual information can: NCC lasts for a very short time and does not reach either visual short-term memory or visual long-term memory; the content of visual states is stored in memory only if and when (...) object-centered attention modulates visual processing and this modulation signifies the onset of the conceptualization of that content; only categorical high-level information that characterizes conceptual content and not metric and precise iconic information that characterizes NCC can be stored in visual memory for long periods; and if NCC were stored in visual memory then this would allow recognitional judgments pertaining to NCC—one could recognize the precise shade of a color that one had seen before. However NCC does not allow such recognitional judgments. (shrink)

In this chapter I argue that despite its current popularity the doctrine of the specious present, or at least every current version of it, should be rejected. I describe two alternative accounts, which deal with experiences of two different kinds of change. The first is what I call the dynamic snapshot theory, which accounts for the way we experience continuous changes such as motion and other motion-like phenomena. The second account deals with the way we experience discontinuous changes, those for (...) which there is no finite rate of change. However I then argue that much of the current debate implicitly presupposes a problematic Cartesian view about the nature of conscious experience. If this view is rejected – as I think it should be – then a different kind of account emerges that avoids commitment both to the specious present and to its main current rival, the cinematic view. (shrink)

We investigated whether a pre-change representation is inhibited or weakened under correct change detection. Two arrays of six objects were rapidly presented for change detection in three experiments. After detection, the perceptual identification of degraded stimuli was tested in Experiments 1 and 2. The weakening of a pre-change representation was not observed under correct detection. The repetition priming effect was observed for a pre-change object and the magnitude was equivalent to the effect for a post-change object. Under change blindness, repetition (...) priming for a pre-change representation was observed when detection did not require report of location in Experiment 1 and was not observed when location was required to be reported in Experiment 2. The results of Experiment 3 showed that a pre-change representation was recognized at a higher rate under correct detection than under change blindness, reflecting a stronger rather than a weaker pre-change representation in the former context. (shrink)

Colour has been shown to facilitate the recognition of scene images, but only when these images contain natural scenes, for which colour is ‘diagnostic’. Here we investigate whether colour can also facilitate memory for scene images, and whether this would hold for natural scenes in particular. In the first experiment participants first studied a set of colour and greyscale natural and man-made scene images. Next, the same images were presented, randomly mixed with a different set. Participants were asked to indicate (...) whether they had seen the images during the study phase. Surprisingly, performance was better for greyscale than for coloured images, and this difference is due to the higher false alarm rate for both natural and man-made coloured scenes. We hypothesized that this increase in false alarm rate was due to a shift from scrutinizing details of the image to recognition of the gist of the image. A second experiment, utilizing images without a nameable gist, confirmed this hypothesis as participants now performed equally on greyscale and coloured images. In the final experiment we specifically targeted the more detail-based perception and recognition for greyscale images versus the more gist-based perception and recognition for coloured images with a change detection paradigm. The results show that changes to images are detected faster when image-pairs were presented in greyscale than in colour. This counterintuitive result held for both natural and man-made scenes and thus corroborates the shift from more detailed processing of images in greyscale to more gist-based processing of coloured images. (shrink)

Studies of change detection suggest that people tend to overestimate their ability to detect visual changes. In a recent laboratory study of change detection and human intention, Beck et al., found that individuals have an inadequate understanding that intention can improve change detection performance and that its importance increases with scene complexity. We note that these findings may be specific to unfamiliar situations such as those generated routinely in studies of change detection. In two questionnaire studies, we demonstrate that when (...) participants consider real world scenarios such as driving, people are well aware that the intention to detect changes improves detection performance, especially in complex scenes. We suggest several reasons why change detection findings like Beck et al.’s do not generalize to real world situations. More broadly, we suggest a possible way to bridge the gap between lab and life. (shrink)

Change blindness is the striking failure to see large changes that normally would be noticed easily. Over the past decade this phenomenon has greatly contributed to our understanding of attention, perception, and even consciousness. The surprising extent of change blindness explains its broad appeal, but its counterintuitive nature has also engendered confusions about the kinds of inferences that legitimately follow from it. Here we discuss the legitimate and the erroneous inferences that have been drawn, and offer a set of requirements (...) to help separate them. In doing so, we clarify the genuine contributions of change blindness research to our understanding of visual perception and awareness, and provide a glimpse of some ways in which change blindness might shape future research. (shrink)

In a series of three experiments, we explored the nature of implicit representations in change blindness . Using 3 × 3 letter arrays, we asked subjects to locate changes in paired arrays separated by 80 ms ISIs, in which one, two or three letters of a row in the second array changed. In one testing version, a tone followed the second array, signaling a row for partial report . In the other version, no PR was required. After Ss reported whether (...) a change had been detected and the PR had been completed , they were asked to identify a degraded letter trigram that was either novel, or from a previously shown row . Our findings indicate that when CB occurs, both the pre-change and post-change stimulus information primes despite its unavailability to consciousness. Surprisingly, findings also indicate that when change detection occurs only the post-change information primes. (shrink)

Anxiety has been associated with enhanced unconscious processing of threat and attentional biases towards threat. Here, we focused on the phenomenology of perception in anxiety and examined whether threat-related material more readily enters anxious than non-anxious individuals’ awareness. In six experiments, we compared the stimulus exposures required for each anxiety group to become objectively or subjectively aware of masked facial stimuli varying in emotional expression. Crucially, target emotion was task irrelevant. We found that high trait-anxiety individuals required less sensory evidence (...) to become aware of the face targets. This anxiety-based difference was observed for fearful faces in all experiments, but with non-threat faces, it emerged only when these were presented among threatening faces. Our findings suggest a prominent role for affective context in high-anxiety individuals’ conscious perception of visual stimuli. Possible mechanisms underlying the influence of context in lowering awareness thresholds in anxious individuals are discussed. (shrink)

According to a popular strategy amongst economists and philosophers, in order to solve the problem of interpersonal utility comparisons, we have to look at how ordinary people make such comparisons in everyday life. The most recent attempt to develop this strategy has been put forward by Goldman in his “Simulation and Interpersonal Utility” (Ethics 4:709–726, 1995). Goldman claims, first, that ordinary people make interpersonal comparisons by simulation and, second, that simulation is reliable for making interpersonal comparisons. In this paper, I (...) focus on Goldman’s latter claim. After updating Goldman’s account of how ordinary people make interpersonal comparisons in the light of Goldman’s newest formulation of his simulation theory of mental ascription (Goldman, Simulating Minds. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006), I develop and assess Goldman’s arguments in favour of the reliability of simulation for interpersonal comparisons. I argue that, under certain conditions, there may be room for a scientifically acceptable solution to the problem of interpersonal utility comparisons. (shrink)

Large changes that occur in clear view of an observer can become difficult to notice if made during an eye movement, blink, or other such disturbance. This change blindness is consistent with the proposal that focused visual attention is necessary to see change, with a change becoming difficult to notice whenever conditions prevent attention from being automatically drawn to it. -/- It is shown here how the phenomenon of change blindness can provide new results on the nature of visual attention, (...) including estimates of its capacity and the extent to which it can bind visual properties into coherent descriptions. It is also shown how the resultant characterization of attention can in turn provide new insights into the role that it plays in the perception of scenes and events. (shrink)

How must experience of time be structured in time? In particular, does the following principle, which I will call inheritance, hold: for any temporal property apparently presented in perceptual experience, experience itself has that same temporal property. For instance, if I hear Paul McCartney singing ‘Hey Jude’, must my auditory experience of the ‘Hey’ itself precede my auditory experience of the ‘Jude’, or can the temporal order of these experiences come apart from the order the words are experienced as having? (...) A number of recent authors (Phillips Experience and Time, ‘The Temporal Structure of Experience’, Soteriou ‘Perceiving Events’, Hoerl ‘“A Succession of Feelings, in and of Itself, is Not a Feeling of Succession”’, Rashbrook) claim, to paraphrase Martin (399), that inheritance best characterises how our temporal experience seems to initial reflective intuition. For this reason, Phillips takes the principle to form part of our naïve view of temporal experience. An opposing group of theorists object that inheritance is subject to empirical counter-example. This article surveys such challenges. Section 2 considers Grush's case against inheritance based on postdiction. Section 3 examines Watzl's anti-inheritance argument based on silencing effects. Finally, Section 4 explores a number of alleged counter-examples proposed by Lee (‘Temporal Experience and the Temporal Structure of Experience’). Section 1 provides essential background to the debate. (shrink)

The naïve view of temporal experience (Phillips, in: Lloyd D, Arstila V (eds) Subjective time: the philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of temporality, forthcoming-a) comprises two claims. First, that we are perceptually aware of temporal properties, such as succession and change. Second, that for any temporal property apparently presented in experience, our experience itself possesses that temporal property. In his paper ‘Silencing the experience of change’ (forthcoming), Watzl argues that this second naïve inheritance thesis faces a novel counter-example in the form (...) of the striking motion silencing effects recently demonstrated by Suchow and Alvarez (Curr Biol 21(2):140–143, 2011). Here I clarify the form which any counter-example to naïve inheritance must take. I then explain how, on a plausible, rival ‘crowding’ interpretation of Suchow and Alvarez’s data, motion silencing poses no more of a threat to naïve inheritance than standard cases of change blindness. (shrink)

Colour has been shown to facilitate the recognition of scene images, but only when these images contain natural scenes, for which colour is ‘diagnostic’. Here we investigate whether colour can also facilitate memory for scene images, and whether this would hold for natural scenes in particular. In the first experiment participants first studied a set of colour and greyscale natural and man-made scene images. Next, the same images were presented, randomly mixed with a different set. Participants were asked to indicate (...) whether they had seen the images during the study phase. Surprisingly, performance was better for greyscale than for coloured images, and this difference is due to the higher false alarm rate for both natural and man-made coloured scenes. We hypothesized that this increase in false alarm rate was due to a shift from scrutinizing details of the image to recognition of the gist of the image. A second experiment, utilizing images without a nameable gist, confirmed this hypothesis as participants now performed equally on greyscale and coloured images. In the final experiment we specifically targeted the more detail-based perception and recognition for greyscale images versus the more gist-based perception and recognition for coloured images with a change detection paradigm. The results show that changes to images are detected faster when image-pairs were presented in greyscale than in colour. This counterintuitive result held for both natural and man-made scenes and thus corroborates the shift from more detailed processing of images in greyscale to more gist-based processing of coloured images. (shrink)

Kuhn and colleagues described a novel attentional misdirection approach to investigate overt and covert attention mechanisms in connection with inattentional blindness . This misdirection paradigm is valuable to study the temporal relationship between eye movements and visual awareness. Although, as put forth in this comment, the link between attentional misdirection and inattentional blindness needs to be developed further. There are at least four differences between the two paradigms which concern the conceptual aspects of the unexpected object and the methodological aspects (...) of the task design. This highlights the need for a broader theoretical framework incorporating inattentional blindness and overt and covert attention mechanisms. Two possible research lines focusing on the orienting attention research and the “selection-for-action” paradigm are discussed. (shrink)

The philosophical investigation of perceptual illusions can generate fruitful insights in the study of subjective time consciousness. However, the way illusions are interpreted is often controversial. Recently, proponents of the so-called dynamic snapshot theory have appealed to the Waterfall Illusion, a kind of motion aftereffect, to support a particular view of temporal consciousness according to which experience is structured as a series of instantaneous snapshots with dynamic qualities. This dynamism is meant to account for familiar features of the phenomenology of (...) time, such as succession, continuity, and change. Previous theories have typically appealed to a subjective present occupying an interval of time; that is, a “specious present.” I argue, through analysis of motion aftereffect illusions and the rare condition of akinetopsia, i.e. motion-blindness, that the Waterfall Illusion fails to support the dynamic snapshot theory as intended. Furthermore, I suggest that future theories of subjective time should see temporal phenomenology as the result of non-localised processes closely tied to the mechanism underlying consciousness generally. (shrink)

This study adopted a change detection task to investigate whether and how recognition intent affects the construction of orthographic representation in visual word recognition. Chinese readers and nonreaders detected color changes in radical components of Chinese characters. Explicit recognition demand was imposed in Experiment 2 by an additional recognition task. When the recognition was implicit, a bias favoring the radical location informative of character identity was found in Chinese readers , but not nonreaders . With explicit recognition demands, the effect (...) of radical location interacted with radical function and word frequency . An estimate of identification performance under implicit recognition was derived in Experiment 3. These findings reflect the joint influence of recognition intent and orthographic regularity in shaping readers’ orthographic representation. The implication for the role of visual attention in word recognition was also discussed. (shrink)

In this paper I critique the ethical implications of automating CCTV surveillance. I consider three modes of CCTV with respect to automation: manual, fully automated, and partially automated. In each of these I examine concerns posed by processing capacity, prejudice towards and profiling of surveilled subjects, and false positives and false negatives. While it might seem as if fully automated surveillance is an improvement over the manual alternative in these areas, I demonstrate that this is not necessarily the case. In (...) preference to the extremes I argue in favour of partial automation in which the system integrates a human CCTV operator with some level of automation. To assess the degree to which such a system should be automated I draw on the further issues of privacy and distance. Here I argue that the privacy of the surveilled subject can benefit from automation, while the distance between the surveilled subject and the CCTV operator introduced by automation can have both positive and negative effects. I conclude that in at least the majority of cases more automation is preferable to less within a partially automated system where this does not impinge on efficacy. (shrink)

Recently, a number of experiments have emphasized the degree to which subjects fail to detect large changes in visual scenes. This finding, referred to as “change blindness,” is often considered surprising because many people have the intuition that such changes should be easy to detect. Levin, Momen, Drivdahl, and Simons documented this intuition by showing that the majority of subjects believe they would notice changes that are actually very rarely detected. Thus subjects exhibit a metacognitive error we refer to as (...) “change blindness blindness.” Here, we test whether CBB is caused by a misestimation of the perceptual experience associated with visual changes and show that it persists even when the pre- and postchange views are separated by long delays. In addition, subjects overestimate their change detection ability both when the relevant changes are illustrated by still pictures, and when they are illustrated using videos showing the changes occurring in real time. We conclude that CBB is a robust phenomenon that cannot be accounted for by failure to understand the specific perceptual experience associated with a change. (shrink)

Recent research exploring phenomena such as change blindness, inattentional blindness, attentional blink and repetition blindness has revealed a number of counterintuitive ways in which apparently salient visual stimuli often go unnoticed. In fact, large majorities of subjects sometimes predict that they would detect visual changes that actually are rarely noticed, suggesting that people have strong beliefs about visual experience that are demonstrably incorrect. However, for other kinds of visual metacognition, such as picture memory, people underpredict performance. This paper describes two (...) experiments demonstrating that both these overpredictions of change detection, and underpredictions of visual memory can be linked with intuitions about the visual experience of different kinds of agents. Subjects predicted more visual change detection and poorer visual memory for mechanical representational systems when these were anthropomorphized using intentional terminology. (shrink)

Attention is often conceived as a gateway to consciousness . Although endogenous spatial attention may be independent of conscious perception , exogenous spatial orienting seems instead to be an important modulator of CP . Here, we investigate the role of auditory alerting in CP in normal observers. We used a behavioral task in which phasic alerting tones were presented either at unpredictable or at predictable time intervals prior to the occurrence of a near-threshold visual target. We find, for the first (...) time in neurologically intact observers, that phasic alertness increases CP, both objectively and subjectively. This result is consistent with evidence showing that phasic alerting can ameliorate the spatial bias exhibited by visual neglect patients . The alerting network may increase the activity of fronto-parietal networks involved in top-down amplification required to bring a stimulus into consciousness. (shrink)

Magicians use misdirection to prevent you from realizing the methods used to create a magical effect, thereby allowing you to experience an apparently impossible event. Magicians have acquired much knowledge about misdirection, and have suggested several taxonomies of misdirection. These describe many of the fundamental principles in misdirection, focusing on how misdirection is achieved by magicians. In this article we review the strengths and weaknesses of past taxonomies, and argue that a more natural way of making sense of misdirection is (...) to focus on the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms involved. Our psychologically-based taxonomy has three basic categories, corresponding to the types of psychological mechanisms affected: perception, memory, and reasoning. Each of these categories is then divided into subcategories based on the mechanisms that control these effects. This new taxonomy can help organize magicians' knowledge of misdirection in a meaningful way, and facilitate the dialog between magicians and scientists. (shrink)

A commentary on: Seeing changes: How familiarity alters our perception of change by Tovey, M., and Herdman, C. (2014). Vis. Cogn. 22, 214–238 .