David Barrettsuppose attention is necessary for consciousness. The evidence Prinz offers for the claim is very
strong and, to my mind, gives us good reason to believe attention will play an important role
in the ultimately correct theory of consciousness. These are virtues of Prinz’s view that anyone
hoping to construct that correct theory would do well to consider.
Notes1 One might have wondered by now why it is availability to working memory that matters rather than
information being actually encoded there. Here are three quick reasons Prinz offers. First, we can
sustain frontal lobe damage (where working memory is housed) without suffering from any deficits
in awareness. Second, experience is too complex for working memory’s capacities. We can experience,
say fifteen items on a computer monitor, but the exact number would never be encoded in working
memory. We could not report how many items were on the screen. Third, most famously, our ability
to discriminate colors vastly outstrips our ability to recall them. We can separate out millions of differ-
ent shades of colors, but give us a delay period and we could never recall which exact colors we had
experienced. Working memory thus seems to encode higher level representations, not the intermediate
level representations we have reason to believe are conscious.
2 Lack of space does not permit full examination of the point, but it is interesting to note that some of the
evidence Prinz provides for claim (2)—especially for the necessity of attention for consciousness—can
come under fire. Chapter 5 of Wu (2014) presents an interesting discussion of inattentional blindness.
He argues that one could explain the findings of the experiments that support inattentional blindness
along the lines of inattentional agnosia, or inattentional apraxia. In either case, one could be fully con-
scious of the unreported targets. On either interpretation, the evidence for the necessity of attention is
undermined. The same explanation could work, I take it, for the attentional blink, undermining that bit
of evidence, as well.
ReferencesAwh, E., Vogel, E. and Oh, S. (2006) “Interactions between attention and working memory,” Neuroscience
139: 201–208.
Baars, B. (1988) A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Baddeley, A. (2007) Working Memory, Thought and Action, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Berti, A. Oxbury, S., Oxbury, J., Affanni, P., Umilta, C., and Orlandi, L. (1999) “Somatosensory extinction
for meaningful objects in a patient with right hemispheric stroke,” Neuropsychologia 37: 333–343.
Block, N. (2013) “The grain of vision and the grain of attention,” Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 1 :
170–184.
Crick, F., and Koch, K. (1990) “Towards a neurobiological theory of consciousness,” Seminars in Neuroscience
2: 263–275.
Hassin, R., Bargh, J., Engell, A., and McCulloch, K. (2009) “Implicit working memory,” Consciousness and
Cognition 18: 665–678.
Kentridge, R., de-Wit, L., and Heywood, C. (2008) “What is attended in spatial attention?” Journal of
Consciousness Studies 15: 105–111.
Kriegel, U. (2005) “Naturalizing subjective character,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71: 23–57.
Lamme, V. (2003) “Why visual attention and awareness are different,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7: 12–18.
Lycan, W. (1996) Consciousness and Experience, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marr, D. (1982) Vision, San Francisco, CA: Freeman.
Mole, C. (2008) “Attention and consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 15: 86–104.
Norman, L., Heywood, C., and Kentridge, R. (2013) “Object-based attention without awareness,” Psychologi-
cal Science 24: 836–843.
Pessiglione, M., Schmidt, L., Draganski, B., Kalisch, R., Lau, H., Dolan, R., and Frith, C. (2007) “How the
brain translates money into force: a neuroimaging study of subliminal motivation,” Science 316: 904–906.
Pitt, D. (2004) “The phenomenology of cognition, or, what is it like to think that P?” Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 69: 1–36.
Posner, M. (1980) “Orienting of attention,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 32: 3–25.