What distinguishes conscious information processing from other kinds of information processing is its phenomenal aspect (PAC), the-what-it-is-like for an agent to experience something. The PAC supplies the agent with a sense of self, and informs the agent on how its self is affected by the agent’s own operations. The PAC originates from the activity that attention performs to detect the state of what I define “the self” (S). S is centered and develops on a hierarchy of innate and acquired values, (...) and is primarily expressed via the central and peripheral nervous systems; it maps the agent’s body and cognitive capacities, and its interactions with the environment. The detection of the state of S by attention modulates the energy level of the organ of attention (OA), i.e., the neural substrate that underpins attention. This modulation generates the PAC. The PAC can be qualified according to five dimensions: qualitative, quantitative, hedonic, temporal and spatial. Each dimension can be traced back to a specific feature of the modulation of the energy level of the OA. (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)

Imitation and mirroring processes are necessary but not sufficient conditions for children to develop human sociality. Human sociality entails more than the equivalence and connectedness of perceptual experiences. It corresponds to the sense of a shared world made of shared values. It originates from complex ‘open’ systems of reciprocation and negotiation, not just imitation and mirroring processes that are by definition ‘closed’ systems. From this premise, we argue that if imitation and mirror processes are important foundations for sociality, human inter-subjectivity (...) develops primarily in reciprocation, not just imitation. Imitation provides a basic sense of social connectedness and mutual acknowledgment of existing with others that are ‘like me.’ However, it does not allow for the co-construction of meanings with others. For human sociality to develop, imitation and mirroring processes need to be supplemented by an open system of reciprocation. Developmental research shows that from the second month, mirroring, imitative, and other contagious emotional responses are by-passed. Imitation gives way to first signs of reciprocation (primary intersubjectivity), joint attention to objects (secondary intersubjectivity), the emergence of values that are jointly represented and negotiated with others (tertiary intersubjectivity), and eventually the development of an ethical stance accompanying theories of mind by 4 years of age. We review this development and propose that if mirroring processes enable individuals to bridge their subjective experiences, human inter-subjectivity proper develops from reciprocal social exchanges that lead to value negotiation and mutual recognition, both cardinal trademarks of human sociality. (shrink)

This book draws on Iris Murdoch's philosophy to explore questions related to the importance of attention in ethics. In doing so, it also engages with Murdoch's ideas about the existence of a moral reality, the importance of love, and the necessity but also the difficulty, for most of us, of fighting against our natural self-centred tendencies. Why is attention important to morality? This book argues that many moral failures and moral achievements can be explained by attention. Not only our actions (...) and choices, but the possibilities we choose among, and even the meaning what we perceive, are to a large extent determined by whether we pay attention, and what we attend do. In this way, the book argues that attention is fundamental, though often overlooked, in morality. While the book's discussion of attention revolves primarily around Murdoch's thought, it also engages significantly with Simone Weil, who introduced the concept of attention in a spiritual context. The book also engages with contemporary debates concerning moral perception and motivation, empirical psychology, animal ethics, and Buddhist philosophy. The Ethics of Attention will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil, ethics and moral psychology, and the philosophy of attention. (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)

Increasing evidence suggests that cognitive-control processes can be configured to optimize either persistence of information processing (by amplifying competition between decision-making alternatives and top-down biasing of this competition) or flexibility (by dampening competition and biasing). We investigated whether high-frequency binaural beats, an auditory illusion suspected to act as a cognitive enhancer, have an impact on cognitive-control configuration. We hypothesized that binaural beats in the gamma range bias the cognitive-control style toward flexibility, which in turn should increase the crosstalk between tasks (...) in a dual-task paradigm. We replicated earlier findings that the reaction time in the first-performed task is sensitive to the compatibility between the responses in the first and the second task—an indication of crosstalk. As predicted, exposing participants to binaural beats in the gamma range increased this effect as compared to a control condition in which participants were exposed to a continuous tone of 340 Hz. These findings provide converging evidence that the cognitive-control style can be systematically biased by inducing particular internal states; that high-frequency binaural beats bias the control style toward more flexibility; and that different styles are implemented by changing the strength of local competition and top-down bias. (shrink)

There has recently been much interest in the role of attention in controlling action. The role has been mischaracterized as an element in necessary and sufficient conditions on agential control. In this paper I attempt a new characterization of the role. I argue that we need to understand attentional control in order to fully understand agential control. To fully understand agential control we must understand paradigm exercises of agential control. Three important accounts of agential control—intentional, reflective, and goal-represented control—do not (...) fully explain such exercises. I argue that understanding them requires understanding how deployments of visual attention implement flexible occurrent control, or a capacity to flexibly adjust the degree of control that individuals exercise over their actions. While such deployments of attention are neither necessary nor sufficient for exercising agential control, they constitute an attentional skill for controlling action, understanding which is central to fully understanding agential control. We can appreciate its centrality if we appreciate that this attentional skill for controlling action is plausibly crucial to acting non-negligently. (shrink)

The nature of attention has been the topic of a lively research programme in psychology for over a century. But there is widespread agreement that none of the theories on offer manage to fully capture the nature of attention. Recently, philosophers have become interested in the debate again after a prolonged period of neglect. This paper contributes to the project of explaining the nature of attention. It starts off by critically examining Christopher Mole’s prominent “adverbial” account of attention, which traces (...) the failure of extant psychological theories to their assumption that attending is a kind of process. It then defends an alternative, process-based view of the metaphysics of attention, on which attention is understood as an activity and not, as psychologists seem to implicitly assume, an accomplishment. The entrenched distinction between accomplishments and activities is shown to shed new light on the metaphysics of attention. It also provides a novel diagnosis of the empirical state of play. (shrink)

Human vision briefly retains a trace of a stimulus after it disappears. This trace—iconic memory—is often believed to be a surrogate for the original stimulus, a representational structure that can be used as if the original stimulus were still present. To investigate its nature, a flicker-search paradigm was developed that relied upon a full scan (rather than partial report) of its contents. Results show that for visual search it can indeed act as a surrogate, with little cost for alternating between (...) visible and iconic representations. However, the duration over which it can be used depends on the type of task: some tasks can use iconic memory for at least 240 ms, others for only about 190 ms, while others for no more than about 120 ms. The existence of these different limits suggests that iconic memory may have multiple layers, each corresponding to a particular level of the visual hierarchy. In this view, the inability to use a layer of iconic memory may reflect an inability to maintain feedback connections to the corresponding representation. (shrink)

Five aspects of visual change detection are reviewed. The first concerns the concept of change itself, in particular the ways it differs from the related notions of motion and difference. The second involves the various methodological approaches that have been developed to study change detection; it is shown that under a variety of conditions observers are often unable to see large changes directly in their field of view. Next, it is argued that this “change blindness” indicates that focused attention is (...) needed to detect change, and that this can help map out the nature of visual attention. The fourth aspect concerns how these results affect our understanding of visual perception—for example, the implication that a sparse, dynamic representation underlies much of our visual experience. Finally, a brief discussion is presented concerning the limits to our current understanding of change detection. (shrink)

Do we need to attend to an object in order to be conscious of it, and are the objects of our attention necessarily part of our conscious experience? A tight link between attention and consciousness has often been assumed, but it has recently been questioned, on the basis of psychophysical evidence suggesting a double dissociation between top-down attention and consciousness. The present review proposes to consider these issues in the light of time-honored distinctions between exogenous and endogenous forms of attention (...) and between primary and reflective forms of consciousness. These distinctions permit to interpret results from several sources of evidence, including patterns of performance of brain-damaged patients with visual neglect, as suggesting that exogenous attention is a necessary condition for primary visual consciousness to emerge. Visual neglect, which typically results from damage to fronto-parietal networks in the right hemisphere, entails an inability to orient to and to detect contralesional objects. Importantly, neglect patients are not only unable to verbally report contralesional objects, but may also act as if these objects did not exist, for example by bumping into them, thus suggesting an impairment of primary perceptual consciousness. Less frequently, neglect patients may instead show forms of “implicit” knowledge of neglected items, perhaps indicating a deficit of more reflective forms of consciousness, such as those subserving verbal reportability. The integration of several sources of evidence, such as phenomenology, experimental psychology and neuroscience, is needed to further explore the taxonomy of these processes and to identify their neural correlates. (shrink)

Existentialist accounts maintain that visual phenomenal content takes the logical form of an existentially quantified sentence. These accounts do not make phenomenal content specific enough. Singularist accounts posit a singular content in which the seen object is a constituent. These accounts make phenomenal content too specific. My account gets the specificity of visual phenomenal content just right. My account begins with John Searle's suggestion that visual experience represents an object as seen, moves this relation outside the scope of the existential (...) quantifier and then replaces it with the relation of objects being ‘present as accessible’, as described by Alva Noë. (shrink)

We propose a framework for including information‐processing bounds in rational analyses. It is an application of bounded optimality (Russell & Subramanian, 1995) to the challenges of developing theories of mechanism and behavior. The framework is based on the idea that behaviors are generated by cognitive mechanisms that are adapted to the structure of not only the environment but also the mind and brain itself. We call the framework computational rationality to emphasize the incorporation of computational mechanism into the definition of (...) rational action. Theories are specified as optimal program problems, defined by an adaptation environment, a bounded machine, and a utility function. Such theories yield different classes of explanation, depending on the extent to which they emphasize adaptation to bounds, and adaptation to some ecology that differs from the immediate local environment. We illustrate this variation with examples from three domains: visual attention in a linguistic task, manual response ordering, and reasoning. We explore the relation of this framework to existing “levels” approaches to explanation, and to other optimality‐based modeling approaches. (shrink)

Explicatures are not cancellable. Theoretical considerations.

What is attention? Attention is often seen as a subject matter for the hard sciences of cognitive and brain processes, and is understood in terms of sub-personal mechanisms and processes. Correspondingly, there still is a stark contrast between the central role attention plays for the empirical investigation of the mind in psychology and the neurosciences, and its relative neglect in philosophy. Yet, over the past years, several philosophers have challenged the standard conception. A number of interesting philosophical questions concerning the (...) nature of attention arise. This article provides an introduction to contemporary debates concerning these questions. In particular, it discusses the question of how the pre-theoretic conception of attention might be reconciled with a scientific conception, arguments that provide support for an anti-reductivist theory of attention, and sketches several recent anti-reductivist theories and their inter-relations. (shrink)

Neuropsychological research on the neural basis of behaviour generally posits that brain mechanisms will ultimately suffice to explain all psychologically described phenomena. This assumption stems from the idea that the brain is made up entirely of material particles and fields, and that all causal mechanisms relevant to neuroscience can therefore be formulated solely in terms of properties of these elements. Thus, terms having intrinsic mentalistic and/or experiential content (e.g. ‘feeling’, ‘knowing’ and ‘effort’) are not included as primary causal factors. This (...) theoretical restriction is motivated primarily by ideas about the natural world that have been known to be fundamentally incorrect for more than three-quarters of a century. Contemporary basic physical theory differs profoundly from classic physics on the important matter of how the consciousness of human agents enters into the structure of empirical phenomena. The new principles contradict the older idea that local mechanical processes alone can account for the structure of all observed empirical data. Contemporary physical theory brings directly and irreducibly into the overall causal structure certain psychologically described choices made by human agents about how they will act. This key development in basic physical theory is applicable to neuroscience, and it provides neuroscientists and psychologists with an alternative conceptual framework for describing neural processes. Indeed, owing to certain structural features of ion channels critical to synaptic function, contemporary physical theory must in principle be used when analysing human brain dynamics. The new framework, unlike its classic-physics-based predecessor, is erected directly upon, and is compatible with, the prevailing principles of physics. It is able to represent more adequately than classic concepts the neuroplastic mechanisms relevant to the growing number of empirical studies of the capacity of directed attention and mental effort to systematically alter brain function.. (shrink)

The essays collected in this volume are all concerned with the connection between fiction and truth. This question is of utmost importance to metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophical logic and epistemology, raising in each of these areas and at their intersections a large number of issues related to creation, existence, reference, identity, modality, belief, assertion, imagination, pretense, etc. All these topics and many more are addressed in this collection, which brings together original essays written from various points of view by (...) philosophers of diverse trends. These essays constitute major contributions to the current debates that the connection between truth and fiction continually enlivens, and give a sense of the directions in which research on this question is heading. Contributors: Fred Adams, Frederick Kroon, Robert Howell, Brendan Murday, Terence Parsons, Graham Priest, Erich Rast, Manuel Rebuschi, Marion Renauld, R.M. Sainsbury, Grant Tavinor, Alberto Voltolini. (shrink)

One of the more compelling beliefs about vision is that it is based on representations that are coherent and complete, with everything in the visual field described in great detail. However, changes made during a visual disturbance are found to be difficult to see, arguing against the idea that our brains contain a detailed, picture-like representation of the scene. Instead, it is argued here that a more dynamic, "just-in-time" representation is involved, one with deep similarities to the way that users (...) interact with external displays. It is further argued that these similarities can provide a basis for the design of intelligent display systems that can interact with humans in highly effective and novel ways. (shrink)

Quantum approaches to consciousness are sometimes said to be motivated simply by the idea that quantum theory is a mystery and consciousness is a mystery, so perhaps the two are related. That opinion betrays a profound misunderstanding of the nature of quantum mechanics, which consists fundamentally of a pragmatic scientific solution to the problem of the connection between mind and matter.

_René Descartes proposed an interactive dualism that posits an interaction between the_ _mind of a human being and some of the matter located in his or her brain. Isaac Newton_ _subsequently formulated a physical theory based exclusively on the material/physical_ _part of Descartes’ ontology. Newton’s theory enforced the principle of the causal closure_ _of the physical, and the classical physics that grew out of it enforces this same principle._ _This classical theory purports to give, in principle, a complete deterministic account (...) of the_ _physically described properties of nature, expressed exclusively in terms of these_ _physically described properties themselves. Orthodox contemporary physical theory_ _violates this principle in two separate ways. First, it injects random elements into the_ _dynamics. Second, it allows, and also requires, abrupt probing actions that disrupt the_ _mechanistically described evolution of the physically described systems. These probing_ _actions are called Process 1 interventions by von Neumann. They are psycho-physical_ _events. Neither the content nor the timing of these events is determined either by any_ _known law, or by the afore-mentioned random elements. Orthodox quantum mechanics_ _considers these events to be instigated by choices made by conscious agents. In von_ _Neumann’s formulation of quantum theory each such intervention acts upon the state of_ _the brain of some conscious agent. Thus orthodox von Neumann contemporary physics_ _posits an interactive dualism similar to that of Descartes. But in this quantum version the_ _effects of the conscious choices upon our brains are controlled, in part, by the known_ _basic rules of quantum physics. This theoretically specified mind-brain connection allows_ _many basic psychological and neuropsychological findings associated with the apparent_ _physical effectiveness of our conscious volitional efforts to be explained in a causal and_ _practically useful way.. (shrink)

Large changes in a scene often become difficult to notice if made during an eye movement, image flicker, movie cut, or other such disturbance. It is argued here that this _change blindness_ can serve as a useful tool to explore various aspects of vision. This argument centers around the proposal that focused attention is needed for the explicit perception of change. Given this, the study of change perception can provide a useful way to determine the nature of visual attention, and (...) to cast new light on the way that it is?and is not?involved in visual perception. To illustrate the power of this approach, this paper surveys its use in exploring three different aspects of vision. The first concerns the general nature of _seeing_. To explain why change blindness can be easily induced in experiments but apparently not in everyday life, it is proposed that perception involves a _virtual representation_, where object representations do not accumulate, but are formed as needed. An architecture containing both attentional and nonattentional streams is proposed as a way to implement this scheme. The second aspect concerns the ability of observers to detect change even when they have no visual experience of it. This _sensing_ is found to take on at least two forms: detection without visual experience (but still with conscious awareness), and detection without any awareness at all. It is proposed that these are both due to the operation of a nonattentional visual stream. The final aspect considered is the nature of visual attention itself?the mechanisms involved when _scrutinizing_ items. Experiments using controlled stimuli show the existence of various limits on visual search for change. It is shown that these limits provide a powerful means to map out the attentional mechanisms involved. (shrink)

Neural Darwinism (ND) is a large scale selectionist theory of brain development and function that has been hypothesized to relate to consciousness. According to ND, consciousness is entailed by reentrant interactions among neuronal populations in the thalamocortical system (the ‘dynamic core’). These interactions, which permit high-order discriminations among possible core states, confer selective advantages on organisms possessing them by linking current perceptual events to a past history of value-dependent learning. Here, we assess the consistency of ND with 16 widely recognized (...) properties of consciousness, both physiological (for example, consciousness is associated with widespread, relatively fast, low amplitude interactions in the thalamocortical system), and phenomenal (for example, consciousness involves the existence of a private flow of events available only to the experiencing subject). While no theory accounts fully for all of these properties at present, we find that ND and its recent extensions fare well. (shrink)

This paper argues that a theory of situated vision, suited for the dual purposes of object recognition and the control of action, will have to provide something more than a system that constructs a conceptual representation from visual stimuli: it will also need to provide a special kind of direct (preconceptual, unmediated) connection between elements of a visual representation and certain elements in the world. Like natural language demonstratives (such as `this' or `that') this direct connection allows entities to be (...) referred to without being categorized or conceptualized. Several reasons are given for why we need such a preconcep- tual mechanism which individuates and keeps track of several individual objects in the world. One is that early vision must pick out and compute the relation among several individual objects while ignoring their properties. Another is that incrementally computing and updating representations of a dynamic scene requires keeping track of token individuals despite changes in their properties or locations. It is then noted that a mechanism meeting these requirements has already been proposed in order to account for a number of disparate empiri- cal phenomena, including subitizing, search-subset selection and multiple object tracking (Pylyshyn et al., Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology 48(2) (1994) 260). This mechanism, called a visual index or FINST, is brie. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a model of demonstrative thought. I distinguish token-demonstratives, that pick out individuals, from type-demonstratives, that pick out kinds, or properties, and provide a similar treatment for both. I argue that it follows from my model of demonstrative thought, as well as from independent considerations, that demonstration, as a mental act, operates directly on mental representations, not external objects. That is, though the relation between a demonstrative and the object or property demonstrated is semantically direct, the (...) mechanism by which a demonstrative acquires its referent involves mediation by a perceptual representation. Finally, I argue that so-called 'demonstrative concepts'—which I treat as type-demonstratives—cannot perform the various philosophical functions that have been assigned to them. (shrink)

Do basic human values facilitate prosocial behaviour on a global scale? This study, for the first time, analyzes the effect of values on prosocial behaviour in the context of public support for foreign development assistance. Support for foreign development assistance is a prosocial act intended to benefit the less fortunate in developing nations. Despite a plethora of evidence showing the effect of personal values on prosocial behaviour, the literature has neglected the value origins of support for development assistance. I argue (...) that personal values play a crucial role in shaping individuals’ support for foreign development assistance. Using data from nationally representative samples covering 11 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, I show that self-transcendence and openness to change values, as defined by Schwartz’ theory of values, are reliable predictors of support for foreign development assistance. By linking human values to foreign development aid, this study expands the purview of values research to the domain of global governance and opens up new avenues of interdisciplinary inquiry that apply theories of values to different dimensions of world affairs. (shrink)

One of the features of John Locke’s moral philosophy is the idea that morality is based on our beliefs concerning the future good. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding II, xxi, §70, Locke argues that we have to decide between the probability of afterlife and our present temptations. In itself, this kind of decision model is not rare in Early Modern philosophy. Blaise Pascal’s Wager is a famous example of a similar idea of balancing between available options which Marcelo Dascal (...) has discussed in his important 2005 article “The Balance of Reason”. -/- Leibniz, however, was not always satisfied with this kind of simple balancing. In his commentary to Locke’s Essay, Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain, II, xxi, §66, he presented an alternative model which is based on an idea of plural, mutually conflicting inclinations. This kind of model, called as vectorial theory of rational decision by Simo Knuuttila, fits well with Leibniz’s theory of the soul where volitions are formed as a kind of compromise between different inclinations to different goods. -/- I will present these two models and show how they illustrate the practical rationality of Locke and Leibniz and how their moral philosophies differ, although being similar in certain respects. The topics include Leibniz’s criticism of Lockean hedonism and the discussion of akratic behaviour in II, xxi of Essay and Nouveaux essais. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore and defend the idea that we have epistemic responsibilities with respect to our visual searches, responsibilities that are far more fine-grained and interesting than the trivial responsibilities to keep our eyes open and “look hard”. In order to have such responsibilities, we must be able to exert fine-grained and interesting forms of control over our visual searches. I present both an intuitive case and an empirical case for thinking that we do, in fact, have such (...) forms of control over our visual searches. I then show how these forms of control can be used to aim the visual beliefs that result from our searches towards various epistemic goals. (shrink)

This article addresses issues in developing cognitive architectures--generic computational models of cognition. Cognitive architectures are believed to be essential in advancing understanding of the mind, and therefore, developing cognitive architectures is an extremely important enterprise in cognitive science. The article proposes a set of essential desiderata for developing cognitive architectures. It then moves on to discuss in detail some of these desiderata and their associated concepts and ideas relevant to developing better cognitive architectures. It argues for the importance of taking (...) into full consideration these desiderata in developing future architectures that are more cognitively and ecologically realistic. A brief and preliminary evaluation of existing cognitive architectures is attempted on the basis of these ideas. (shrink)

Oversimplified conceptions of cognitive neuroscience regard the goal of this discipline as the localization of previously discovered and validated cognitive processes. Research however is showing how brain data goes far beyond this translation role, as it can be used to help in explaining human cognition. Knowing about the brain is useful in building and redefining taxonomies of the mind and also in describing the mechanisms by which cognitive phenomena proceed. The present paper takes the cognitive system of attention as a (...) model research field to exemplify how biological knowledge can be used to advance the psychological theories explaining mental phenomena. (shrink)

Goal‐directed cognition is often discussed in terms of specialized memory structures like the “goal stack.” The goal‐activation model presented here analyzes goal‐directed cognition in terms of the general memory constructs of activation and associative priming. The model embodies three predictive constraints: (1) the interference level, which arises from residual memory for old goals; (1) the strengthening constraint, which makes predictions about time to encode a new goal; and (3) the priming constraint, which makes predictions about the role of cues in (...) retrieving pending goals. These constraints are formulated algebraically and tested through simulation of latency and error data from the Tower of Hanoi, a means‐ends puzzle that depends heavily on suspension and resumption of goals. Implications of the model for understanding intention superiority, postcompletion error, and effects of task interruption are discussed. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that consciousness is a unique way of processing information, in that: it produces information, rather than purely transmitting it; the information it produces is meaningful for us; the meaning it has is always individuated. This uniqueness allows us to process information on the basis of our personal needs and ever-changing interactions with the environment, and consequently to act autonomously. Three main basic cognitive processes contribute to realize this unique way of information processing: the self, attention (...) and working memory. The self, which is primarily expressed via the central and peripheral nervous systems, maps our body, the environment, and our relations with the environment. It is the primary means by which the complexity inherent to our composite structure is reduced into the “single voice” of a unique individual. It provides a reference system that (albeit evolving) is sufficiently stable to define the variations that will be used as the raw material for the construction of conscious information. Attention allows for the selection of those variations in the state of the self that are most relevant in the given situation. Attention originates and is deployed from a single locus inside our body, which represents the center of the self, around which all our conscious experiences are organized. Whatever is focused by attention appears in our consciousness as possessing a spatial quality defined by this center and the direction toward which attention is focused. In addition, attention determines two other features of conscious experience: periodicity and phenomenal quality. Self and attention are necessary but not sufficient for conscious information to be produced. Complex forms of conscious experiences, such as the various modes of givenness of conscious experience and the stream of consciousness, need a working memory mechanism to assemble the basic pieces of information selected by attention. (shrink)

Patterns of inattention in children: Findings from the inattention checklist for teachers This study concerns construction of a checklist for teachers designed to find out types of attention disorders in children. Inattention is not a homogenous phenomenon. Patterns of coexistence of inattention signs and other behavioral symptoms could reflect different psychological mechanisms. In first study teachers described 242 children aged 9 to 10 using Inattention Checklist for Teachers. In second study teachers described 361 children aged 8 to 10 using modified (...) version of the ICT. Factor analysis conducted in the first study resulted in extraction of five factors. In the second study previously extracted factors were validated by cluster analyses and profiles referring to co-occurring behavioral symptoms were developed. Analysis of profiles has shown that attention disorders comprise at least two groups of inattention symptoms that in relation to other factors and learning difficulties constitute different patterns of inattention. It is suggested that these patterns reflect differences between attention disorders caused by cognitive malfunctioning, impaired behavioral or emotional control. (shrink)

This study looked for evidence of biases in the allocation and disengagement of attention in dysphoric individuals. Participants studied images for a recognition memory test while their eye fixations were tracked and recorded. Four image types were presented (depression-related, anxiety-related, positive, neutral) in each of two study conditions. For the simultaneous study condition, four images (one of each type) were presented simultaneously for 10 seconds, and the number of fixations and the total fixation time to each image was measured, similar (...) to the procedure used by Eizenman et al. (2003) and Kellough, Beevers, Ellis, and Wells (2008). For the sequential study condition, four images (one of each type) were presented consecutively, each for 4 seconds; to measure disengagement of attention an endogenous cuing procedure was used (Posner, 1980). Dysphoric individuals spent significantly less time attending to positive images than non-dysphoric individuals, but there were no group differences in attention to depression-related images. There was also no evidence of a dysphoria-related bias in initial shifts of attention. With respect to the disengagement of attention, dysphoric individuals were slower to disengage their attention from depression-related images. The recognition memory data showed that dysphoric individuals had poorer memory for emotional images, but there was no evidence of a conventional mood-congruent memory bias. Differences in the attentional and memory biases observed in depressed and dysphoric individuals are discussed. (shrink)