Philosophy: Attention and the Size of the Conscious Field

Several philosophical views of conscious experience have emerged. Two such views are the rich view and the thin view. On a rich view of conscious experience, there is constant experience in several modalities; for example, you have constant tactile experience of your shirt on your back, constant auditory experience of the background rumble of traffic, constant visual experience of the tip of your nose. On a thin view of consciousness, there is no experience without attention; that is, when you aren't paying attention to such things, they drop out of consciousness entirely, so that they form no part of your stream of experience—not even vaguely, peripherally, amorphously—no part of your phenomenology, no part of what it's like to be you.

There is, of course, perceptual processing without attention. A gentle tug on the shirt or an unexpected movement in the visual periphery will generally get your attention, even if you are fully absorbed in other things. To get attention, such events must first register preattentively. As your attention centers on one or a few things, you monitor many others inattentively, ready to redirect attention when an inattentional process detects a large or important change. The question is whether experience accompanies such inattentional perceptual processing, or whether, instead, that processing is entirely nonconscious. We might think of consciousness like a soup. Is it a rich soup, replete with experience across broad regions of several modalities simultaneously—visual experience across a broad field (though perhaps indistinct outside the central region), proprioceptive experience of the condition and position of your body, olfactory experience of the room, and perhaps emotional phenomenology, cognitive phenomenology, inner speech and imagery as well, all simultaneously? Or is experience a thin soup, limited to just one or a few regions, objects, or modalities at a time?

A clock starts chiming, but you only start attending to the chimes part way through. It seems you can count back chimes in your memory—it has chimed three times, say. What, exactly, are you remembering? Are you remembering an auditory experience of those three unattended chimes (as an advocate of the rich view might say)? Or are you only remembering an outward event, the chiming of the clock, that was not until now in any way experienced by you?

A variety of philosophers and psychologists have endorsed rich or thin views of experience on different grounds. (Moderate views, according to which experience outruns attention but only to a moderate [Page 813]degree, are also possible but less commonly endorsed.) On purely introspective grounds, William James and John Searle have endorsed rich views, whereas Julian Jaynes and David Armstrong promote thin views. Although the question might appear to be easily settled by introspection (simply introspect now and determine how much is going on in your consciousness), the divergence of opinion among philosophers and psychologists should give us pause. The central problem with concurrent introspection as a method of addressing the issue is what is sometimes called the refrigerator light illusion: The fact that you have auditory experience of the hum of traffic when you're thinking about whether you hear the hum of traffic provides no evidence on the question of whether you have auditory experience of the hum of traffic when you're not considering the matter. Just as the act of checking if the refrigerator light turns it on, so also might the act of checking for tactile experience of one's shirt or visual experience of one's nose produce those very experiences.

...