On the evolution of conscious attention

Abstract

This paper aims to clarify the relationship between consciousness and attention through theoretical considerations about evolution. Specifically, we will argue that the empirical findings on attention and the basic considerations concerning the evolution of the different forms of attention demonstrate that consciousness and attention must be dissociated regardless of which definition of these terms one uses. To the best of our knowledge, no extant view on the relationship between consciousness and attention has this advantage. Because of this characteristic, this paper presents a principled and neutral way to settle debates concerning the relationship between consciousness and attention, without falling into disputes about the meaning of these terms. A decisive conclusion of this approach is that extreme views on the relationship between consciousness and attention must be rejected, including identity and full dissociation views. There is an overlap between the two within conscious attention, but developing a full understanding of this mechanism requires further empirical investigations.

Reply to Montemayor and Haladjian

“…Accordingly, we disagree with M&H's definition of attention provided in their comment as, 'selective processing of information that provides access to contents [4]'. We are confused by this definition as it seems to contradict the excellent review of the varieties of attention by the same authors, including what they call 'low-level attention' [4]. Perhaps instead of providing access of contents to cognitive systems, M&H's definition includes providing low-level areas in sensory hierarchies access to contents from even earlier stages?…”

“…Second, attention does not necessarily lead to cognitive access. We outlined this point on page 3 of our original paper [1], and M&H have written extensively in agreement [4]. The currently accepted broad definition of attention is a set of mechanisms that bias (select) a subset of information for further processing.…”

The Attention Schema Theory: A Foundation for Engineering Artificial Consciousness

“…The possible co-evolution of attention and awareness has been discussed before (Graziano, 2010(Graziano, , 2013(Graziano, , 2014Haladjian and Montemayor, 2015;Graziano and Webb, 2016). Since the basic vertebrate brain mechanisms for controlling attention emerged more than half a billion years ago, we speculate that the origin of awareness, at least in preliminary form, may be equally ancient.…”

Perception and Cognition Are Largely Independent, but Still Affect Each Other in Systematic Ways: Arguments from Evolution and the Consciousness-Attention Dissociation

“…These would be epistemically fundamental cases of cognitive penetration at later stages of perception, where the cognitive integration of emotion, cognition, and perception is at work. Here we try to strike a balance between these opposite views by appealing to the CAD framework and the argument from evolution (see Haladjian and Montemayor, 2015). A more nuanced view is required not only to solve the epistemic problem mentioned above, but also to achieve a comprehensive theory of perception that accounts for the epistemic and motivational significance of perception, and the Bayesian approach is particularly helpful here.…”

“…For similar reasons, semantic priming should also be considered an attentional effect that is cognitively driven and that occurs at later stages of processing. In the evolution of the visual and other perceptual systems, it is likely that feature-based attention and basic forms of object-based attention evolved first, and only later can one find complex forms of semantically driven attention to features relevant to expertise and propositional contents (see Haladjian and Montemayor, 2015). Attention based on propositional content is, therefore, a kind of cognitive guidance that must occur at later stages of perceptual processing and which must have evolved more recently.…”