[Baars, Introduction: Treating Consciousness as a Variable]
p.6 There is an interesting class of phenomena that is neither quite conscious nor unconscious, but that
is nevertheless central to normal mental functioning. William James believed that such "fringe conscious" events were at least
as important as focal conscious experiences... Fringe states seem to be very useful. There is evidence that they are involved
in accurate decision-making, predict resolution of tip-of-the-tongue states
[George Mandler, Consciousness: Respectable, Useful, and Probably Necessary]
p.17 attention... is an allotment of analysing mechanisms to a limited region of the field
p.17 preattentive processes, that is, processes that are not in attention but precede it, have the function
of forming the objects of attention. Some of these preattentive processes... are innate. Many actions are under such preattentive
control.
p.24 Evaluative activities often act on conscious content, but evaluative activities also may take place
at an 'unconscious' level.
p.26 The need for a rapid reduction of all the sensory information available to an organism at any given
point in time and space is obvious.
[Francis Crick, Christof Koch, Consciousness and Neuroscience]
p.39 Attention is broadly of two types: bottom-up, caused by the sensory input; and top-down, produced by
the planning parts of the brain.
[Anne Treisman, Feature Binding, Attention, and Object Perception]
p.63 The binding problem in perception deals with the question of how we achieve the experience of a coherent
world of integrated objects, and avoid seeing a world of disembodied or wrongly combined shapes, colours, motions, sizes,
and distances. In brief, how do we specify what goes with what and where? The problem is not an intuitively obvious one, which
is probably a testimony to how well, in general, our brains solve it. We simply are not aware that there is a problem
to be solved. Yet findings from neuroscience, computer science and psychology all imply that there is.
There is considerable evidence that the visual system analyses the scene along with a number of different
dimensions in various specialized modules.
p.79 The results... suggested that attention is needed to bind features together, and that without attention,
the only information recorded is the presence of separate parts and properties. Yet... there are conditions in which wholes
are registered automatically, without attention or conscious awareness.
[Anne Treisman, Strategies and Models of Selective Attention]
p.207 Attention can be defined as the selective aspect of perception and response. Any theory about attention
therefore presupposes some general framework of ideas on the nature of the perceptual system.
p.213 It seems likely also, that the parallel use of several analyzers is biologically the most useful form
of divided attention, since we typically need to recognize and respond to objects defined by values along a number of dimensions.
Selective attention to inputs or targets often requires divided attention to different analyzers and tests.
p.222 The ability to select voluntarily a single target or subset of features to look for is demonstrated
by the same experiments... we must conclude that [subjects] can restrict their analysis to features relevant to the task.
The ability to do this often improves considerably with practice, provided that the target chosen makes it possible potentially
to select a subset of tests for critical features
[Rensink, O'Regan, Clark, To See or Not to See]
p.257 Visual perception of change in an object occurs only when that object is given focused attention
p.258-259 Under normal conditions, the motion signals resulting from a change draw attention to its location
and so allow the observer to perceive it... the perception of change can occur only during the time that the object is being
attended... After attention is removed, the perception of change vanishes... Previous work has shown that the gist of a scene
can be determined within 100-150 ms ... it may well be that the gist includes a description of the most interesting aspects,
which are then used to guide attention... Why can people look at but not always see objects that come into their field of
view? The evidence presented here indicates that the key factor is attention, without which observers are blind to change.
p.259-260 given that attention is normally drawn to any change in a scene and is also attracted to those
parts most relevant for the task at hand, the subjective impression of an observer will generally be of a richly detailed
environment, with accurate representation of those aspects of greatest importance.
[Francis Crick, Function of the Thalamic Reticular Complex: The Searchlight Hypothesis]
p.263-264 the time needed [JLJ - to accomplish a certain visual identification test] increases linearly
with the number of distractors... as if the brain had an internal attentional searchlight that moved around from one visual
object to the next, with steps as fast as 70 ms in favorable cases. In this metaphor the searchlight is not supposed to light
up part of a completely dark landscape but, like a searchlight at dusk, it intensifies part of a scene that is already visible
to some extent.
If there is indeed a searchlight mechanism in the brain, how does it work and where is it located?
To approach this problem we must study the general layout of the brain and, in particular, that of the neocortex and the thalamus.
[JLJ - perhaps these are the portions of the brain which we must functionally duplicate when constructing software to play
a strategic game.]
p.266 What do we require of a searchlight? It should be able to sample the activity in the cortex and/or
the thalamus and decide 'where the action is.' It should then be able to intensify the thalamic input to that region of the
cortex, probably by making the active thalamic neurons in that region fire more rapidly than usual. It must then be able to
turn off its beam, move to the next place demanding attention, and repeat the process.
p.270 The brain must know what it is searching for... so that it may know when its hunt is successful.
In other words, the brain must know what to attend to.
[JLJ - It seems that the brain must construct a rapid diagnostic test which separates 'searched
for' items from 'not searched for' items. This diagnostic test must be modified if too many 'false alarms' or 'missed items'
happen and this error in detection impacts performance.
"Before beginning a Hunt, it is wise to ask someone what you are looking for before you begin looking for
it." -Winnie the Pooh
"Problem solving is hunting. It is savage pleasure and we are born to it." -Thomas Harris ]
[David LaBerge, Attention, Awareness, and the Triangular Circuit]
p.291 The operations of attention are crucial to the successful performance of our everyday tasks. A large
amount of research by experimental psychologists has shown that the attentional process helps us to select a target item from
distractors in a cluttered visual scene... it helps us to prepare in advance for an expected stimulus so that we may respond
more quickly and correctly to it
p.292 William James wrote... that the particular things we agree to attend to depend on their interest
to us.
p.294 the expression of attention is the emphasis of a particular component of a cognitive event...
[this] corresponds to a difference in activity levels between... the attended (target) component and its neighboring (distractor)
components
[Arthur Reber, Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge]
[JLJ - Implicit learning is learning of complex information in an incidental manner, without awareness
of what has been learned.]
p.603 this is an article about learning... The energies of cognitive scientists have been invested largely
in the analysis and modeling of existing knowledge rather than in investigations of how it was acquired... What follows is
an exploration of implicit learning from the point of view that the processes discussed are general and universal.
p.620 knowledge acquired from implicit learning procedures is knowledge that, in some raw fashion, is always
ahead of the capability of its possessor to explicate it [JLJ - explicate: to make plain or clear; explain; interpret]
p.621 a goodly amount of knowledge acquisition takes place in the absence of intent to learn... there is
such an amazing variety of implicit processes that have been observed and yet there is nothing approaching a satisfactory
theoretical account of them... unconscious mental processes are the foundations upon which emerging conscious operations are
laid. The really difficult problem, then, is to discern how these components of mind interact.
p.623-624 What makes these various processes intriguing and what differentiates these sophisticated processes
from the primitive is that all share a basic operating property: They all depend on a rich, abstract knowledge base that asserts
itself in a causal manner to control perception, affective choice, and decision making independently of consciousness. This
component of the cognitive unconscious depends on previously acquired knowledge, as opposed to the primitive component,
which operated to acquire such knowledge... there is awareness of the knowledge base itself.... they are based on knowledge
systems that have become highly automatized.... these systems all function on a symbolic level.
p.625 To have an intuitive sense of what is right and proper... is to have gone through an implicit learning
experience and have built up the requisite representative knowledge base to allow for such judgment.
p.625"Summary
This article is an attempt to come to grips with an essential, although oft-ignored, problem in contemporary
cognitive psychology: the acquisition of complex knowledge. At the heart of the presented thesis is the concept of implicit
learning wherein abstract, representative knowledge of the stimulus environment is acquired, held, and used to control behavior.
The operations of implicit learning are shown to take place independently of consciousness; their mental products have been
demonstrated to be held tacitly; their functional controlling properties have been shown to operate largely outside awareness.
[Mangan, The Conscious "Fringe" ]
p.742 In general, the function of the fringe is to represent huge amounts of nonconscious context information
in consciousness in radically summarized or condensed form... The fringe is apparently a device to radically condense
context information in consciousness and in a sense finesse the limited capacity of consciousness. The fringe makes
minimal demands on the overall articulation resources of consciousness, freeing most of these resources for the representation
of detailed focal experience.
p.753 Inattentive experience serves two crucial functions - it implies that detailed information is available
if attention were to be directed toward it, and provides a target to which attention can be focused in order to actually
bring the detailed information into consciousness.
[Bernard Baars, Metaphors of Consciousness and Attention in the Brain]
p.1113-1114 What do we require of a searchlight? It should be able to sample activity ... and decide 'where
the action is.' It should then be able to intensify... input to that region... It must then be able to turn off its beam,
move to the next place demanding attention, and repeat the process... real searchlights are guided to their targets, suggesting
executive control, and are useless without an audience to whom the contents in the illuminated spot are disseminated... Thus
searchlight metaphors do not stand alone, but imply a larger framework: a surrounding 'theater.'
p.1114 the fundamental function of the theater architecture is to make possible novel, adaptive interactions
between the sensory inflow, motor outflow and a range of knowledge sources in the brain.
p.1115 An attractive distinction [JLJ - between the terms 'attention' and 'consciousness'] is to limit the
term 'attention' to selective operations, while applying 'consciousness' to events that humans can report. Thus, attention
involves the selection of targets for the searchlight to shine on, while consciousness results from the illumination of the
target... In this article, 'attention' will be used for selective processes, and 'consciousness' for events that can be reported.
