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Consciousness, Attention, and Conscious Attention

Author: Carlos Montemayor

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2024-06-11

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 0262552477

A rigorous analysis of current empirical and theoretical work supporting the argument that consciousness and attention are largely dissociated. In this book, Carlos Montemayor and Harry Haladjian consider the relationship between consciousness and attention. The cognitive mechanism of attention has often been compared to consciousness, because attention and consciousness appear to share similar qualities. But, Montemayor and Haladjian point out, attention is defined functionally, whereas consciousness is generally defined in terms of its phenomenal character without a clear functional purpose. They offer new insights and proposals about how best to understand and study the relationship between consciousness and attention by examining their functional aspects. The book's ultimate conclusion is that consciousness and attention are largely dissociated. Undertaking a rigorous analysis of current empirical and theoretical work on attention and consciousness, Montemayor and Haladjian propose a spectrum of dissociation—a framework that identifies the levels of dissociation between consciousness and attention—ranging from identity to full dissociation. They argue that conscious attention, the focusing of attention on the contents of awareness, is constituted by overlapping but distinct processes of consciousness and attention. Conscious attention, they claim, evolved after the basic forms of attention, increasing access to the richest kinds of cognitive contents. Montemayor and Haladjian's goal is to help unify the study of consciousness and attention across the disciplines. A focused examination of conscious attention will, they believe, enable theoretical progress that will further our understanding of the human mind.

Consciousness, Attention, and Conscious Attention

Author: Carlos Montemayor

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2015-04-17

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 0262028972

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The Conscious Brain

Author: Jesse J. Prinz

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-08-17

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 019971813X

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The problem of consciousness continues to be a subject of great debate in cognitive science. Synthesizing decades of research, The Conscious Brain advances a new theory of the psychological and neurophysiological correlates of conscious experience. Prinz's account of consciousness makes two main claims: first consciousness always arises at a particular stage of perceptual processing, the intermediate level, and, second, consciousness depends on attention. Attention changes the flow of information allowing perceptual information to access memory systems. Neurobiologically, this change in flow depends on synchronized neural firing. Neural synchrony is also implicated in the unity of consciousness and in the temporal duration of experience. Prinz also explores the limits of consciousness. We have no direct experience of our thoughts, no experience of motor commands, and no experience of a conscious self. All consciousness is perceptual, and it functions to make perceptual information available to systems that allows for flexible behavior. Prinz concludes by discussing prevailing philosophical puzzles. He provides a neuroscientifically grounded response to the leading argument for dualism, and argues that materialists need not choose between functional and neurobiological approaches, but can instead combine these into neurofunctional response to the mind-body problem. The Conscious Brain brings neuroscientific evidence to bear on enduring philosophical questions, while also surveying, challenging, and extending philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness. All readers interested in the nature of consciousness will find Prinz's work of great interest.

Visual Attention and Consciousness

Author: Jay Friedenberg

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1848729057

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This book is an ambitious, interdisciplinary survey of the empirical literature on many different aspects of visual attention and consciousness. It may be used as a primary or ancillary text for graduate courses in perception, vision, consciousness or philosophy of mind.

Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience

Author: Michael S A Graziano

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2019-09-17

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0393652629

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“A first-class intellectual adventure.” —Brian Greene, author of Until the End of Time Illuminating his groundbreaking theory of consciousness, known as the attention schema theory, Michael S. A. Graziano traces the evolution of the mind over millions of years, with examples from the natural world, to show how neurons first allowed animals to develop simple forms of attention and then to construct awareness of the external world and of the self. His theory has fascinating implications for the future: it may point the way to engineers for building consciousness artificially, and even someday taking the natural consciousness of a person and uploading it into a machine for a digital afterlife.

Structuring Mind

Author: Sebastian Watzl

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-03-09

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0191633003

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What is attention? How does attention shape consciousness? In an approach that engages with foundational topics in the philosophy of mind, the theory of action, psychology, and the neurosciences this book provides a unified and comprehensive answer to both questions. Sebastian Watzl shows that attention is a central structural feature of the mind. The first half of the book provides an account of the nature of attention. Attention is prioritizing, it consists in regulating priority structures. Attention is not another element of the mind, but constituted by structures that organize, integrate, and coordinate the parts of our mind. Attention thus integrates the perceptual and intellectual, the cognitive and motivational, and the epistemic and practical. The second half of the book concerns the relationship between attention and consciousness. Watzl argues that attentional structure shapes consciousness into what is central and what is peripheral. The center-periphery structure of consciousness cannot be reduced to the structure of how the world appears to the subject. What it is like for us thus goes beyond the way the world appears to us. On this basis, a new view of consciousness is offered. In each conscious experience we actively take a stance on the world we appear to encounter. It is in this sense that our conscious experience is our subjective perspective.

Attention

Author: Wayne Wu

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-04-24

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1317693965

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Attention is a fundamental feature of the mind yet has languished in the backwaters of philosophy. Recent years, however, have witnessed a resurgence of philosophical interest in attention, driven by recognition that it is closely connected to consciousness, perception, agency, thought, justification and introspection. As is becoming clear, attention has a rich philosophical significance. This is the first book to provide a systematic overview and assessment of different empirical and philosophical aspects of attention. Wayne Wu discusses the following central topics and problems: major experiments and theories of attention in psychology since the 1950s the neuroscience of attention, including basic mechanisms and models attention’s intimate relation to agency the phenomenology of attention attention as a gatekeeper for consciousness attention as the basis for perception-based thought about objects the role of attention in the justification of belief attention in introspection of consciousness. A key feature of the book is its skilful analysis of the empirical work on attention, and how this relates to philosophy. Additional features include chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary, making this an ideal starting point for anyone studying attention for the first time, as well as being suitable for more advanced students and researchers in psychology, cognitive science, and philosophy.

Reference and Consciousness

Author: John Campbell

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 2002-06-06

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0191529478

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Campbell investigates how consciousness of the world explains our ability to think about the world. He illuminates problems about thought, reference and experience by looking at the psychological mechanisms on which conscious attention depends.

Attention and consciousness in different senses

Author: Naotsugu Tsuchiya

Publisher: Frontiers E-books

Published: 2013-06-03

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 288919132X

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Although often used in everyday speech and in the scholarly literature, “selective attention” and “consciousness” lack clear, undisputed definitions. Partly because of this deficit there exists a lively debate on the relationship between the two. Nevertheless, attention has been studied scientifically for a long time, because a variety of tasks allow researchers to control several of its aspects (e.g. focused and feature-based attention). Consciousness as a scientific subject of study has emerged more recently, but is now rapidly gaining traction. Scientific studies of consciousness concern the state or level of consciousness (e.g., awake as opposed to in coma, dreamless sleep or under anaesthesia) as well as the contents of consciousness or the phenomenology of perception. With the increase in consciousness-focused research, there is a concomitant surge in research examining the relationship between attention and consciousness. This relationship between attention and consciousness is the topic of this Research Topic. Contributions related to or focused solely on attention or on consciousness will not be considered. It had long been assumed that attention and consciousness are inextricably intertwined: two sides of the same coin. However, recently substantial evidence has emerged that attention and consciousness are interacting, but separable processes. It is however debated how tight the interactions are, and what the exact nature of the relationship is. Therefore, we invite researchers from different “camps” to provide opinionated but balanced literature reviews. Different groups will interpret the same data in different ways. We feel that combining these views in one Research Topic is immensely valuable to researchers from different fields. Apart from reviews we also invite potential contributors to provide new and exciting evidence in the form of original contributions that may support any of the different views. Even though attention and consciousness are critical aspects of many different cognitive processes, they are mainly studied (though not exclusively) in the domain of visual perception. In other sensory modalities, e.g. olfaction or audition, it is currently not clear whether distinctions between attention and consciousness exist, which is even more true for other cognitive processes such as memory. Therefore, we specifically invite contributions covering the auditory, somatosensory, olfactory, and memory domain. We ask all contributors to provide discussions on the relationship between attention and consciousness, and focus on (1) the influence of attention on sensory processing; (2) the formation of conscious perception, (3) the evidence for unconscious processing and its modulation by attention; (4) potential indications for dissociations between attention and consciousness (e.g. does paying attention to a stimulus decrease performance on e.g. a discrimination task?); (5) neuroimaging and neurophysiology data pertaining to these questions. Often, one is caught in one’s own research field and lacks the time or the knowledge to delve into another field. This Research Topic should provide a great overview in great breadth of the current state of knowledge on the links between attention and consciousness, and their interactions, in several different sensory modalities.

Attention

Author: Christopher Mole

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-07-25

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0199877211

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Attention has been studied in cognitive psychology for more than half a century, but until recently it was largely neglected in philosophy. Now, however, attention has been recognized by philosophers of mind as having an important role to play in our theories of consciousness and of cognition. At the same time, several recent developments in psychology have led psychologists to foundational questions about the nature of attention and its implementation in the brain. As a result there has been a convergence of interest in fundamental questions about attention. This volume presents the latest thinking from the philosophers and psychologists who are working at the interface between these two disciplines. Its fourteen chapters contain detailed philosophical and scientific arguments about the nature and mechanisms of attention; the relationship between attention and consciousness; the role of attention in explaining reference, rational thought, and the control of action; the fundamental metaphysical status of attention, and the details of its implementation in the brain. These contributions combine ideas from phenomenology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of mind to further our understanding of this centrally important mental phenomenon, and to bring to light the foundational questions that any satisfactory theory of attention will need to address.