Perceptual Attention

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonardon Ganeri
Keyword(s):  
Phenomenal Character ◽  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Perceptual Attention ◽  
Conscious Attention

Conscious attention performs two distinct roles in experience, a role of placing and a role of focusing, roles which match a distinction between selection and access endorsed in recent theories of attention. The intentionality of conscious experience consists in two sorts of attentional action, a focusing at and a placing on, the first lending to experience a perspectival categorical content and the second structuring its phenomenal character. Placing should be thought of more like opening a window for consciousness than as shining a spotlight, and focusing has to do with accessing the properties of whatever the window opens onto. A window is an aperture whose boundaries are defined by what is excluded—in this case, distractors.

An active role of inferior frontal cortex in conscious experience

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veith Weilnhammer ◽  
Merve Fritsch ◽  
Meera Chikermane ◽  
Anna-Lena Eckert ◽  
Katharina Kanthak ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Frontal Cortex ◽  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Inferior Frontal Cortex

scholarly journals The Role of Conscious Attention in How Weight Serves as an Embodiment of Importance

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (12) ◽  
pp. 1712-1723 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin A. Zestcott ◽  
Jeff Stone ◽  
Mark J. Landau
Keyword(s):  
Conscious Attention

scholarly journals How to investigate perceptual projection: a commentary on Pereira Jr., “The projective theory of consciousness: from neuroscience to philosophical psychology”

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (spe) ◽  
pp. 233-242
Author(s):  
Max Velmans
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Human Information Processing ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Bipolar Structure ◽  
Target Article ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Third Person

Abstract: This commentary focuses on the scientific status of perceptual projection-a central feature of Pereira’s projective theory of consciousness. In his target article, he draws on my own earlier work to develop an explanatory framework for integrating first-person viewable conscious experience with the third-person viewable neural correlates and antecedent causes that form conscious experience into a bipolar structure that contains both a sense of self (created by interoceptive projective processes) and a sense of the world (created by exteroceptive projective processes). I stress that perceptual projection is a psychological effect (not an explanation for that effect) and list many of the ways it has been studied within experimental psychology, for example in studies of depth perception in vision and audition and experiences of depth arising from cues arranged on two-dimensional surfaces in stereoscopic pictures, 3D cinemas, holograms, and virtual realities. I then juxtapose Pereira’s explanatory model with two other models that have similar aims and background assumptions but different orientations, Trehub’s Retinoid model, which focuses largely on the neural functioning of the visual system, and Rudrauf et al’s Projective Consciousness Model, which draws largely on projective geometries to specify the requirements of organisms that need to navigate a three-dimensional world, and how these might be implemented in human information processing. Together, these models illustrate both converging and diverging approaches to understanding the role of projective processes in human consciousness.

Cognitive penetration: Would we know it if we saw it?

1999 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 390-391
Author(s):  
Gillian Rhodes ◽  
Michael L. Kalish
Keyword(s):  
Signal Detection ◽  
Neural Activity ◽  
Context Effects ◽  
Cognitive Penetration ◽  
Computational Power ◽  
Early Vision ◽  
Perceptual Cues ◽  
Perceptual Attention

How can the impenetrability hypothesis be empirically tested? We comment on the role of signal detection measures, suggesting that context effects on discriminations for which post-perceptual cues are irrelevant, or on neural activity associated with early vision, would challenge impenetrability. We also note the great computational power of the proposed pre-perceptual attention processes and consider the implications for testability of the theory.

On the roles of consciousness and representations in visual science

1998 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 757-758 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Earle
Keyword(s):  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Visual Science ◽  
Task Level

It is argued that there is a role for the representational conception of vision, and that this is compatible with the task-level account advocated by Pessoa et al. However, the role of representations must be understood independently of our conscious experience of vision.

scholarly journals ‘Intentional binding’ without intentional action

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keisuke Suzuki ◽  
Peter Lush ◽  
Anil Seth ◽  
Warrick Roseboom
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Information ◽  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
Sense Of Agency ◽  
Fundamental Aspect ◽  
Implicit Measure ◽  
Intentional Binding ◽  
Related Information ◽  
Temporal And Spatial

The experience of authorship over one’s actions and their consequences - sense of agency - is a fundamental aspect of conscious experience. In recent years, it has become common to use intentional binding as an implicit measure of the sense of agency. However, it remains contentious whether binding effects indicate the role of intention-related information in perception or merely represent a strong case of multisensory causal binding. Here, we use a novel virtual reality setup to demonstrate identical magnitude binding effects both in the presence and complete absence of intentional action, when perceptual stimuli are matched for temporal and spatial information. Our results demonstrate that intentional binding-like effects are most simply accounted for by multisensory causal binding, without necessarily being related to intention or agency. Future studies which relate binding effects to agency must provide evidence for effects beyond that expected for multisensory causal binding by itself.

scholarly journals Intentional Binding Without Intentional Action

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (6) ◽  
pp. 842-853 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keisuke Suzuki ◽  
Peter Lush ◽  
Anil K. Seth ◽  
Warrick Roseboom
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Information ◽  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
Sense Of Agency ◽  
Fundamental Aspect ◽  
Implicit Measure ◽  
Intentional Binding ◽  
Related Information ◽  
Temporal And Spatial

The experience of authorship over one’s actions and their consequences—sense of agency—is a fundamental aspect of conscious experience. In recent years, it has become common to use intentional binding as an implicit measure of the sense of agency. However, it remains contentious whether reported intentional-binding effects indicate the role of intention-related information in perception or merely represent a strong case of multisensory causal binding. Here, we used a novel virtual-reality setup to demonstrate identical magnitude-binding effects in both the presence and complete absence of intentional action, when perceptual stimuli were matched for temporal and spatial information. Our results demonstrate that intentional-binding-like effects are most simply accounted for by multisensory causal binding without necessarily being related to intention or agency. Future studies that relate binding effects to agency must provide evidence for effects beyond that expected for multisensory causal binding by itself.

Direct Realism and the Extended Mind

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Christopher Maloney
Keyword(s):  
Phenomenal Character ◽  
Extended Mind ◽  
Perceptual Content ◽  
Direct Realism ◽  
Perceptual Representation ◽  
Cognitive Representation ◽  
Direct Acquaintance ◽  
The World

Representationalism rightly treats perception as a type of cognitive representation. However, it wrongly proposes that perceptual content determines phenomenal character. Rather, it is the form, not the content, of a perceptual representation that constitutes phenomenal character. For direct realism is true: Perception is that form of cognition in which representation and represented are the same. Other forms of cognition recruit representations that are distinct from what they represent. In contrast, perceptual representation extends the mind's reach into the world by casting the very object perceived in the role of a self-referential demonstrative. By fusing representation and represented perception provides direct acquaintance with what is seen exactly as it is seen to be and thus determines phenomenal character.

Perception

2019 ◽  
pp. 74-112
Author(s):  
Declan Smithies
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Phenomenal Character ◽  
Phenomenal Consciousness ◽  
Justify Belief ◽  
Perceptual Representation ◽  
Evil Demon ◽  
De Re ◽  
Epistemic Role ◽  
New Evil Demon Problem

Chapter 3 explores the epistemic role of consciousness in perception. Section 3.1 argues that unconscious perceptual representation in blindsight cannot justify beliefs about the external world. Section 3.2 argues that this is because phenomenal consciousness, rather than access consciousness or metacognitive consciousness, is necessary for perceptual representation to justify belief. Section 3.3 argues that perceptual experience has a distinctive kind of phenomenal character—namely, presentational force—that is not only necessary but also sufficient for perception to justify belief. Section 3.4 uses a version of the new evil demon problem to argue that the justifying role of perceptual experience supervenes on its phenomenal character alone. Section 3.5 defends this supervenience thesis against the objection that phenomenal duplicates who perceive distinct objects thereby have justification to believe different de re propositions.

Dendritic integration theory: A thalamo-cortical theory of state and content of consciousness

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (II) ◽  
Author(s):  
Talis Bachmann ◽  
Mototaka Suzuki ◽  
Jaan Aru
Keyword(s):  
Pyramidal Neurons ◽  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Pyramidal Cells ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
Integration Theory ◽  
Thalamic Nuclei ◽  
Cortical Pyramidal Neurons ◽  
Cortical System ◽  
Work Done

The idea that the thalamo-cortical system is the crucial constituent of the neurobiological mechanisms of consciousness has a long history. For the last few decades, however, consciousness research has to a large extent overlooked the interplay between the cortex and thalamus. Here we revive an integrated view of the neurobiology of consciousness by presenting and discussing several recent major findings about the role of the thalamocortical interactions in consciousness. Based on these findings we propose a specific cellular mechanism how thalamic nuclei modulate the integration of different processing streams within single cortical pyramidal neurons. This theory is inspired by recent work done in rodents, but it integrates decades of work conducted on various species. We illustrate how this new view readily explains various properties and experimental phenomena associated with conscious experience. We discuss the implications of this idea and some of the experiments that need to be done in order to test it. Our view bridges two long-standing perspectives on the neural mechanisms of consciousness and proposes that cortical and thalamo-cortical processing interact at the level of single pyramidal cells.

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