On the role of attention in generating explicit awareness of contingent relations: Evidence from spatial priming

Consciousness and Cognition 20 (4):1433-1451 (2011)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

In a series of four experiments, we examine the hypothesis that selective attention is crucial for the generation of conscious knowledge of contingency information. We investigated this question using a spatial priming task in which participants were required to localize a target letter in a probe display. In Experiment 1, participants kept track of the frequency with which the predictive letter in the prime appeared in various locations. This manipulation had a negligible impact on contingency awareness. Subsequent experiments requiring participants to attend to features of the predictive letter increased contingency awareness somewhat, but there remained a large proportion of individuals who remained unaware of the strong contingency. Together the results of our experiments suggest that the construct of attention does not fully capture the processes that lead to contingency awareness, and suggest a critical role for bottom-up feature integration in explicit contingency learning

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

What is attended in spatial attention?R. W. Kentridge, L. H. de-Wit & C. A. Heywood - 2008 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 15 (4):105-111.
Binding, spatial attention and perceptual awareness.Lynn C. Robertson - 2003 - Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4 (2):93-102.
Before the `Third Element': Understanding Attention to Self.Vasudevi Reddy - 2005 - In Naomi Eilan, Christoph Hoerl, Teresa McCormack & Johannes Roessler (eds.), Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds. Issues in Philosophy and Psychology. Oxford University Press. pp. 85--109.

Analytics

Added to PP
2014-01-21

Downloads
13 (#886,512)

6 months
2 (#668,348)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?