Attention and Consciousness

Jamesian Roots of the Issues

In a passage that many psychologists cite as being the source of their basic conception of attention, William James (1890) suggests that attention and consciousness are closely related:

In saying that the concentration of consciousness is the essence of attention, James indicates that there is a close link between attention and consciousness, but he does not seem to have thought that they are one and the same thing, as he took it to be possible for there to be conscious states that are not attention involving. Shortly after the passage just quoted, he describes one such “confused, dazed, scatterbrained state” in which conscious thinking apparently proceeds in the absence of attention. Even in this case, however, it is not clear that attention is wholly absent. James tells us that this “scatterbrained state” is the “real opposite” of attention, but he is also prepared to characterize it as a state in which attention is not absent but merely “dispersed so that the whole body is felt” (p. 404).

The point that James leaves unresolved continues to be pertinent in the current debates. Researchers who take the view that all consciousness involves attention are committed to explaining away cases in which we appear to be conscious but are not paying attention to anything in particular. In recent writings, Jesse Prinz has tentatively endorsed James's suggestion that attention in such cases is present but dispersed. This response enables one to save the idea that everything consciously experienced is attended. But to make this response is to give up on the idea (which is equally Jamesian) that attention essentially involves selectivity and “focalization.” A proper assessment of this point will require further work on some neglected conceptual questions concerning the role of selectivity in attention.

Does Consciousness Require Attention?

The view that all consciousness is attention-involving is tempting for those who want to use theories of attention to inform our understanding of consciousness. It is, however, far from being an intuitively appealing view. The popularity it currently enjoys is due to several studies in which preventing attention from being given to a stimulus seems to result in that stimulus failing to be consciously registered. These studies take various forms, corresponding to the various ways in which a subject can be prevented from attending. In the simplest cases of “inattentional blindness,” subjects are prevented from attending to a stimulus because they are performing a task that requires them to attend to something else for the entire duration of that stimulus's presentation. In these conditions, subjects know very little about the stimuli to which no attention was paid. Such effects were first demonstrated for speech stimuli, under the rubric of the “cocktail party effect,” in the mid-20th century. They have recently been studied in detail in experiments using rapidly presented visual stimuli and in experiments employing more naturalistic stimuli, such as films of people playing simple games. In one such experiment, a surprising number of subjects who are giving their attention to players in a basketball-type game fail to notice the appearance of a pantomime gorilla.

...