Chapter
Seven
Attention
(Koch and Tsuchiya, 2007). The phenomena of top-down attention without con-
sciousness and consciousness with little or no top-down attention are also not,
Koch argues, ‘arcane laboratory curiosities that have little relevance to the real
world’ (2007, p. 19): whenever we practise skilled activities that do not require
conscious attention, and indeed happen too fast for it, we live this separation. We
return to this topic in Chapter 8.
The other main option in this category is to say the opposite: that consciousness
and attention are in fact the same thing. In an integrative account of attention,
attention is an emergent property of brain-wide processing – processing which
includes the kind of competitive selection posited by the biased-competition
account, and may depend on dynamic binding by synchrony (Chapter 6). On this
view, the many functions we think of as attentional are manifestations of general
processing characteristics in the brain, and ‘there cannot be an anatomically (or
functionally) identifiable attentional control system’ (Allport, 2011, p. 27). This
theory implies that as soon as we stop trying to claim that attention is causally
responsible for consciousness, we may as well say they are the same thing, and
so we can refer to attention and to consciousness ‘practically interchangeably’ (p.
49). As such, the phenomena that we call spotlights and bottlenecks and so on
are not causal mechanisms, but consequences of those globally integrated neural
interactions ‘whose outcome is conscious attention’ (p. 49).
A related option is to say that attention and consciousness are in constant feed-
back interaction with each other. In Graziano’s attention schema, consciousness
is part of the ‘control machinery’ for attention. Awareness tracks attention as its
internal model, but when errors creep into the model, attention becomes dissoci-
ated from consciousness, and can still operate, but less well. Webb and Graziano
(2015) say that the opposite, awareness without attention, is possible – if the
internal model wrongly indicated that a perceived stimulus was being attended
to – but less likely. In this feedback model, then, attention is the dominant mech-
anism, and attention and consciousness are separable but normally covar y.
ATTENTION AND CONSCIOUSNESS DO NOT EXIST,
OR ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM
The final possibilities left to consider are that we are so profoundly mistaken
about the relation between consciousness and attention that in fact one or both
does not exist, or is illusory. Allport’s view leads nicely into these options, by say-
ing that there is no way to separate attention from the rest of the brain in terms
of either anatomy or function.
In Chapter 3 we explored the idea that we may be under a grand illusion about
consciousness itself, and this will be a thread throughout the rest of the book.
When it comes to attention, some researchers are sceptical that attention is
a meaningful category at all. There are many reasons to think this: rather than
uncovering a coherent set of cognitive or neural mechanisms that can straight-
forwardly be identified with attention, it becomes ever clearer that attentional
processes are diverse and not localised, and most mechanisms involved in atten-
tion sometimes operate in the absence of attention. Attention starts to look more
like thinking than like perception. Just because we observe lots of attentional
effects doesn’t mean there exists anything called attention that causes these
‘top-down attention
and consciousness are
distinct phenomena
that need not occur
together’(Koch and Tsuchiya, 2007, p. 16)‘the many psychological
functions generally
thought of as
attentional [. . .] reflect
general characteristics
of the processing
network as a whole’(Allport, 2011, p. 32)