Does attention alter appearance? This critical issue, debated for over a century, remains unsettled. From psychophysical evidence that covert attention affects early vision-it enhances contrast sensitivity and spatial resolution-and from neurophysiological evidence that attention increases the neuronal contrast sensitivity (contrast gain), one could infer that attention changes stimulus appearance. Surprisingly, few studies have directly investigated this issue. Here we developed a psychophysical method to directly assess the phenomenological correlates of attention in humans. We show that attention alters appearance; it boosts (...) the apparent stimulus contrast. These behavioral results are consistent with neurophysiological findings suggesting that attention changes the strength of a stimulus by increasing its 'effective contrast' or salience. (shrink)

At any given time, a subject has a multiplicity of conscious experiences. A subject might simultaneously have visual experiences of a red book and a green tree, auditory experiences of birds singing, bodily sensations of a faint hunger and a sharp pain in the shoulder, the emotional experience of a certain melancholy, while having a stream of conscious thoughts about the nature of reality. These experiences are distinct from each other: a subject could experience the red book without the singing (...) birds, and could experience the singing birds without the red book. But at the same time, the experiences seem to be tied together in a deep way. They seem to be unified, by being aspects of a single encompassing state of consciousness. (shrink)

Monitoring approaches to consciousness claim that a mental state is conscious when it is suitably monitored. Higher-order monitoring theory makes the monitoring state and the monitored state logically independent. Same-order monitoring theory claims a constitutive, non-contingent connection between the monitoring state and the monitored state. In this paper, I articulate different versions of the same-order monitoring theory and argue for its supremacy over the higher-order monitoring theory.

_Consciousness, Color, and Content_ is a significant contribution to our understanding of consciousness, among other things. I have learned a lot from it, as well as Tye.

Attention is a core property of all perceptual and cognitive operations. Given limited capacity to process competing options, attentional mechanisms select, modulate, and sustain focus on information most relevant for behavior. A significant problem, however, is that attention is so ubiquitous that it is unwieldy to study. We propose a taxonomy based on the types of information that attention operates over—the targets of attention. At the broadest level, the taxonomy distinguishes between external attention and internal attention. External attention refers to (...) the selection and modulation of sensory information. External attention selects locations in space, points in time, or modality-specific input. Such perceptual attention can also select features defined across any of these dimensions, or object representations that integrate over space, time, and modality. Internal attention refers to the selection, modulation, and maintenance of internally generated information, such as task rules, responses, long-term memory, or working memory. Working memory, in particular, lies closest to the intersection between external and internal attention. The taxonomy provides an organizing framework that recasts classic debates, raises new issues, and frames understanding of neural mechanisms. (shrink)

In this speculative paper I would like to show how important the integration of mental content is for a theory of phenomenal consciousness. I will draw the reader's attention to two manifestations of this problem which already play a role in the empirical sciences concerned with consciousness: The binding problem and the superposition problem. In doing so I hope to be able to leave the welltrodden paths of the debate over consciousness. My main concern is to gain a fresh access (...) to the familiar theoretical difficulties associated with the concept of 'consciousness'. (shrink)

Consciousness is a mongrel concept: there are a number of very different "consciousnesses". Phenomenal consciousness is experience; the phenomenally conscious aspect of a state is what it is like to be in that state.

This paper presents arguments from empirical research and from philosophical considerations to the effect that phenomenality and content are two distinct and independent features of mental representations, which are both relational. Thus, it is argued, classical arguments that infer phenomenality from content have to be rejected. Likewise, theories that try to explain the phenomenal character of experiences by appeal to specific types of content cannot succeed. Instead, a dynamic view of consciousness has to be adopted that seeks to explain consciousness (...) by certain ways of processing representations. Therefore, only empirical methods that are able to investigate the dynamics of the mind can be used for the “quest for consciousness” proper. Moreover, the central intuitions about consciousness are best explained when phenomenality and content are clearly distinguished. (shrink)

Blindsight is classically defined as residual visual capacity, e.g., to detect and identify visual stimuli, in the total absence of perceptual awareness following lesions to V1. However, whereas most experiments have investigated what blindsight patients can and cannot do, the literature contains several, often contradictory, remarks about remaining visual experience. This review examines closer these remarks as well as experiments that directly approach the nature of possibly spared visual experiences in blindsight.