Attention is necessary for the conscious perception of any object. Objects not attended to are not seen. What is it that captures attention when we are engaged in some attention-absorbing task? Earlier research has shown that there are only a very few stimuli which have this power and therefore are reliably detected under these conditions . The two most reliable are the observer’s own name and a happy face icon which seem to capture attention by virtue of their meaning. Three (...) experiments are described which explore whether these stimuli are detected under conditions, heretofore unexamined, which either cause inattentional blindness or are associated with a perceptual failure associated with the limits of attention. The evidence obtained indicates that these stimuli have a unique capacity to capture and extend the limits of attention under conditions in which this has been deemed highly unlikely. (shrink)

What constitutes enjoyment of life? Optimal Experience: Psychological Studies of Flow in Consciousness offers a comprehensive survey of theoretical and empirical investigations of the "flow" experience, a desirable or optimal state of consciousness that enhances a person's psychic state. "Flow" can be said to occur when people are able to meet the challenges of their environment with appropriate skills, and accordingly feel a sense of well-being, a sense of mastery, and a heightened sense of self-esteem. The authors show the diverse (...) contexts and circumstances in which flow is reported in different cultures (e.g. Japan, Korea, Australia, Italy), and describe its positive emotional impacts. They reflect on the concept of flow vis-à-vis modern social structures, historical phenomena, and evolutionary biocultural selection. The ways in which the ability to experience flow affects work satisfaction, academic success, and the overall quality of life are suggested; and the childrearing practices that result in the ability to derive enjoyment from life, considered. (shrink)

A central thesis of this book on the cognitive neuroscience of attention is that attention is not a single entity, but a finite set of brain processes that ...

This book discusses principles and theories regarding perception and communication. Relevant research data is presented which support these theories. 2004 APA, all rights reserved).

Arien Mack and Irvin Rock make the radical claim that there is no conscious perception of the visual world without attention to it.

In 1951, Lashley highlighted the importance of serial order for the brain and behavioural sciences. He considered the response chaining account untenable and proposed an alternative employing parallel response activation and "schemata for action". Subsequently, much has been learned about sequential behaviour, particularly in the linguistic domain. We argue that these developments support Lashley's picture, and recent computational models compatible with it are described. The models are developed in a series of steps, beginning with the basic problem of parallel response (...) competition and its possible resolution into serial action. At each stage, important limitations of the previous models are identified and simple additions proposed to overcome them, including the provision of learning mechanisms. Each type of model is compared with relevant data, and the importance of error data is emphasized. Taken together, the models constitute a unified approach to serial order which has achieved considerable explanatory success across disparate domains. (shrink)

" Biosemantics " was the title of a paper on mental representation originally printed in The Journal of Philosophy in 1989. It contained a much abbreviated version of the work on mental representation in Language Thought and Other Biological Categories. There I had presented a naturalist theory of intentional signs generally, including linguistic representations, graphs, charts and diagrams, road sign symbols, animal communications, the "chemical signals" that regulate the function of glands, and so forth. But the term " biosemantics " (...) has usually been applied only to the theory of mental representation. Let me first characterize a more general class of theories called "teleological theories of mental content" of which biosemantics is an example. Then I will discuss the details that distinguish biosemantics from other naturalistic teleological theories. (shrink)