Our views of sensation, of feeling, and of attention determine, if we are logical, the whole further course of our psychological thought and exposition. ...

This first volume contains discussions of the brain, methods for analyzing behavior, thought, consciousness, attention, association, time, and memory.

One of the most important issues concerning the foundations ofconscious perception centerson thequestion of whether perceptual consciousness is rich or sparse. The overflow argument uses a form of ‘iconic memory’ toarguethatperceptual consciousnessisricher (i.e.,has a higher capacity) than cognitive access: when observing a complex scene we are conscious of more than we can report or think about. Recently, the overflow argumenthas been challenged both empirically and conceptually. This paper reviews the controversy, arguing that proponents of sparse perception are committed to the (...) postulation of (i) a peculiar kind of generic conscious representation that has no independent rationale and (ii) an unmotivated form of unconscious representation that in some cases conflicts with what we know about unconscious representation. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

For the past three decades there has been a substantial amount of scientific evidence supporting the view that attention is necessary and sufficient for perceptual representations to become conscious (i.e., for there to be something that it is like to experience a representational perceptual state). This view, however, has been recently questioned on the basis of some alleged counterevidence. In this paper we survey some of the most important recent findings. In doing so, we have two primary goals. The first (...) is descriptive: we provide a literature review for those seeking an understanding of the present debate. The second is editorial: we suggest that the evidence alleging dissociations between consciousness and attention is not decisive. Thus, this is an opinionated overview of the debate. By presenting our assessment, we hope to bring out both sides in the debate and to underscore that the issues here remain matters of intense controversy and ongoing investigation. (shrink)

Does attention alter appearance? This critical issue, debated for over a century, remains unsettled. From psychophysical evidence that covert attention affects early vision-it enhances contrast sensitivity and spatial resolution-and from neurophysiological evidence that attention increases the neuronal contrast sensitivity (contrast gain), one could infer that attention changes stimulus appearance. Surprisingly, few studies have directly investigated this issue. Here we developed a psychophysical method to directly assess the phenomenological correlates of attention in humans. We show that attention alters appearance; it boosts (...) the apparent stimulus contrast. These behavioral results are consistent with neurophysiological findings suggesting that attention changes the strength of a stimulus by increasing its 'effective contrast' or salience. (shrink)

This dissertation is a reconstruction of Hegel's theory of the individual knower. It takes the form of a commentary on the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, a generally ignored section of Hegel's Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. The commentary tries to avoid the trap of explaining Hegel and Hegelian jargon, aiming at a reader familiar with the history of philosophy and the Anglo-American tradition in the philosophy of mind. ;My reconstruction of Hegel's theory shows it to be an attempt to pay (...) the insights of the post-Cartesian philosophy of mind their due, without, however, getting entangled in the aporia engendered by the Cartesian framework. The most repugnant consequence of this framework, against which Hegel fought forcefully, is the conception of the thing-in-itself. This conception arises from accepting a representationalist model of all mental activity, for then reality is forever closed off to the thinker. Yet Hegel does not simply discard respresentationalism; rather, he attempts to elaborate a theory in which certain activities of the individual thinker are decidedly representationalistic, in particular intuition, imagination, and elementary symbol use, but thinking itself is understood non-representationally. In his consideration of the representational activities of the mind, we find Hegel dealing with many of the problems familiar from the empiricists and Kant, such as how particular mental acts can represent universals, and offering a sophisticated theory of levels of representational complexity. ; In his battle against the Cartesian tradition, Hegel invoked two important Aristotelian themes. First, Hegel's philosophy of mind is methodologically naturalistic, in that it is methodologically continuous with this theory of nature; his philosophy of mind is not founded upon any direct revelation of the mind to itself. The individual thinker does not occur as an item of an entirely different kind superadded to nature. Second, Hegel adopts a teleological view of the world--allowing him to say that though nature is first, spirit, as telos, is prior--and in particular that the ultimate telos is a universal active reason which takes the form of thought thinking thought. Because he then identifies this universal thought as the very substance of the world, and holds that the mental activity of the individual thinker can become identical with--not just a representation of--this universal thinking activity, he holds that even in the individual, thought is not representational. (shrink)