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Attention
Attention has been studied in cognitive psychology for more than half a century, but until recently it was largely neglected in philosophy. Now, however, attention has been recognized by philosophers of mind as having an important role to play in our theories of consciousness and of cognition. At the same time, several recent developments in psychology have led psychologists to foundational questions about the nature of attention and its implementation in the brain. As a result there has been a convergence of interest in fundamental questions about attention.
This volume presents the latest thinking from the philosophers and psychologists who are working at the interface between these two disciplines. Its fourteen chapters contain detailed philosophical and scientific arguments about the nature and mechanisms of attention; the relationship between attention and consciousness; the role of attention in explaining reference, rational thought, and the control of action; the fundamental metaphysical status of attention, and the details of its implementation in the brain. These contributions combine ideas from phenomenology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of mind to further our understanding of this centrally important mental phenomenon, and to bring to light the foundational questions that any satisfactory theory of attention will need to address.
This volume presents the latest thinking from the philosophers and psychologists who are working at the interface between these two disciplines. Its fourteen chapters contain detailed philosophical and scientific arguments about the nature and mechanisms of attention; the relationship between attention and consciousness; the role of attention in explaining reference, rational thought, and the control of action; the fundamental metaphysical status of attention, and the details of its implementation in the brain. These contributions combine ideas from phenomenology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of mind to further our understanding of this centrally important mental phenomenon, and to bring to light the foundational questions that any satisfactory theory of attention will need to address.
- GenresPhilosophy
416 pages, Hardcover
First published May 20, 2011
About the author
Christopher Mole
6 books1 followerChristopher Mole has studied philosophy at Oxford and Princeton.
His areas of specialization are Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Mind, and Aesthetics.
He currently teaches in Philosophy and in Cognitive Systems at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
His areas of specialization are Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Mind, and Aesthetics.
He currently teaches in Philosophy and in Cognitive Systems at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
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June 10, 2026
Many papers in this anthology were high-quality and thought-provoking. Moreover, I found them useful to read side-by-side; it is significant to encounter them under the curated order of this anthology. I’ll summarize the contents of some of the papers, and I’ll go off on tangents sometimes.
In “Attention and Integration,” a major contemporary psychologist on attention Alan Allport sketches out the history of how psychologists have conceptualized attention and proposes his view as the alternative. Over this history, most have thought of attention as referring to a set of different attentional mental capacities (e.g., alerting, orienting, executive control, resolving conflicting information or impulses) that each are to be identified with a certain causal process or constraint. The main dispute among these thinkers is whether attention is to be thought of as causal process or a constraint on other causal mental processes (e.g., a sort of “bottleneck” located either early or late on a mental process, like visual processing). In other words, some thinkers regard attention as essentially relational (it can be defined only in relation to some other mental faculty) or as not.
Allport traces this disagreement to theorists’ having one of two distinct conceptions of attention. First, attention can be a state of the whole organism (e.g., it is I who can direct my attention or have my attention directed). Second, attention can be a constraint associated with some subpersonal mental mechanism or some part of my mind (e.g., there is a limit as to how many items my memory can retain). When attention is conceptualized under this second description, the question arises of what or who is responsible for controlling the allocation of attention. Then, most psychologists posit some higher-order control system or central executive to fulfill this role (which is still subpersonal and distinct from the “whole organism” or that which is picked out when one first-personally uses “I”).
Against these ways of thinking, Allport thinks, in contrast, that attention is “an emergent property” of psychological processing. Moreover, he asks us to think that there aren’t distinct kinds of attentional capacities (e.g., the higher-order control system and first-order bottlenecks), but what might appear as such distinct kinds are just different implementations of one and the same capacity, where each implementation, then, can be described as having its own function. In brief, the one basic capacity pertains to the relationship between me and the object I’m attending to; then, the subpersonal functions associated with attention should be thought of as capturing different functions of attention in this basic sense.
There are implications of Allport’s view. For example, a debate that could be had is whether Treisman et al. are right that feature integration in visual processing requires the use of attention, or whether it precedes and makes possible attention. Allport thinks that attention is the outcome of such integration processes, given that attention is a person-level relation between self and object, whereas such integration happens at a subpersonal level.
In “The metaphysics of attention” Christopher Mole argues that we shouldn’t think of attention as consisting in any given mental process that can be identified with a region of the brain. Instead, attention is a higher-order mental phenomenon; Mole uses “adverbialism” (a position in philosophy of perception) to make sense of it. Attention is not an object in the mind, but when we talk of attention, in fact we talk about a manner or way by which certain activities are executed by parts of the mind. (I had trouble understanding what’s really at stake here… Mole claims his view satisfactorily responds to the problem that we use “attention” to talk about too many diverse aspects of the mind, and while that may be the case, surely one can reject his view and still satisfactorily respond to this so-called problem).
In “Attention as structuring of the stream of consciousness” Sebastian Watzl proposes that attention is a unified mental phenomenon that consists in “structuring one’s stream of consciousness.” He spends time explaining what the structure of this stream consists in, in contrast to what might be thought of as items “in” the stream or “mental contents.” He proposes that any attentional process ultimately consists in our making some item more “central” relative to another item, which then is more “peripheral.” I found this paper strange. Watzl doesn’t really argue for anything; he just uses examples to motivate his claims. Moreover, I think we have reason to doubt that his proposal could work. It appears that when we use attention in sensory perception and in thought, it operates in significantly different ways. Namely, in sensory perception, it is useful to make sense of all aspects of one’s visual field “already there,” such that items can be compared with regards to how peripheral v center they are under one’s attention. But in contrast, thought is temporally unfolding, one might say. By attending to something of thought, we enact, make possible, or change what unfolds next. So items are not all laid out “in advance” and can’t be compared on the metric Watzl raises.
Also, noticeably, Watzl’s picture of attention makes it very awkward, if not incoherent, to accommodate an intuitive feature of attention. Namely, the way we attend to something can “transform” what “meaning” that thing has—where it seems ontologically inappropriate to talk about that thing of attention and the aspects of its meaning as all “items” on a par with one another that can vary on the dimension of centrality/peripherality. For example, when I attend to L., there is his physical form I sensorily perceive, but when I attend to him with interest or desire, various facets about who he is, or whom I take him to be, appear to contribute to my conscious experience of him. To force talking about all these aspects contributing to my experience as “items” of my attention has the following unacceptable consequence. Whenever we talk of an object as an “item,” (e.g., a person, a book, a table), it is selected as a numerically self-identical thing that is distinguished from other things in its vicinity (e.g., the ground beneath L’s feet, or the sky behind his head). Unless we get real ad-hoc about it, it appears then that we’d need to make sense of aspects of the meaning of a person or object as also distinguished from other potential aspects of meaning. As a whole, this appears to require a certain determinacy or even “atomism” of units of meaning. But the meaning I’m talking about does not appear to be renderable like that. I’m not making claims about the world, and so there are no (compositional) propositions of my thought, when I simply attend to L in such a way that various facets of who he is come to the fore.
Watzl might want to consign these so-called meanings as having roles that pertain to the ‘structure’ rather than ‘content’ of consciousness. But doing this would open more questions than it would solve. How are compare the sense of centrality/peripherality that holds between items “in” consciousness and the sense of centrality/peripherality that holds between an item “in” consciousness and something else (what is it?) that is “outside” of consciousness and rather pertains to its structuring?
One of my favorite papers in this anthology addresses this sort of issue, John Campbell’s “Visual attention and the epistemic role of consciousness.” He opens this paper up with the question of why do we need conscious experience in order for us to gain knowledge of the world (as opposed to our just receiving non-experiential causal impacts by the world)? He answers this by arguing for a distinction and a certain thesis about it. Campbell distinguishes between two distinct roles that a property can play under our attention: a property can (1) serve as the basis upon which we select an object or region of our visual field in the first place, or (2) serve as that which we can “label” or “access” about an object/region that we’ve already selected. There are disputes that could be had over the relationship between attention and consciousness; are they interdependent, or not, for example? Campbell shoes that attention understood in the sense of (1) can be identified with consciousness.
There’s a naive intuition that what we sensorily experience “exceeds” what we can say about it. There seems to be many teeming sensory details of our experience which we lose out on when we try to make sense of what we’re experiencing by using concepts and words. Campbell argues that this intuition derives from the fact that our cognition can use various properties as the basis for selecting objects, when in so doing and come to perceive a certain object, we do so while lacking being in the position to access the relevant property. For example, young toddlers have remarkable trouble learning color words when they already know many other sorts of words. Arguably, they can attend to particular objects on the basis of their colors (e.g., see a ball as distinct from the wall and the rest of the room around it because the ball is red, when the wall is beige), while they are unable to say that the ball is red. Campbell proposes that we think of being conscious as associated with this level of awareness or attentiveness, which we can have independently of being in the position to “access” the relevant properties and thus are also unable to make claims as to what features the objects we attend to have (“a is F”).
This yields a compelling way to make sense of what it might mean to say that something is “in” the so-called “stream of consciousness” as opposed to is part of its “structuring.” Within the personal level, there are relatively latent/unconscious and explicit/conscious aspects of it, where the difference depends upon whether a certain aspect arises from our using a property to select an object vs. from our having labeled it.
Campbell applies his view to understanding certain issues about perceptual justification. Some thinkers, like Johannes Roessler, think that we lack a stable conception of perceptual justification. Campbell argues that this appearance of instability results from our failure to distinguish between two senses of what it is we perceive (e.g., “perceptual contents”), which correspond to the two roles that a visual property can play sketched out above, (1) and (2). Once we stick with (1) as defining perceptual content (giving us a “sparse” view), we can see that the role of perception might not be to give us knowledge at all. Rather, its role is to give us objects we’ve selected, which then, we can go on (and using thought perhaps) attribute properties to and make claims about—and only then we can find perceptual knowledge in the sense usually talked about. To apply this to the famous example of chicken sexers, a chicken sewer may be conscious of the chick in such a way that he can call it a chick, and he is also conscious of the sex of the chick—but in a different way. The property of the chick of its sex is registered by him only in such a way that it can be used as the basis for selecting relevant objects or regions (e.g., putting the chick in one basket rather than the other).
I found this paper interesting. I’ve been thinking about the distinction between latent and explicit consciousness, but just not specifically with regards to perceptual consciousness, and rather in a way that includes the things that are present by virtue of our having relevant thoughts, feelings, and emotions. I’m not sure whether Campbell’s account here could be extended to this context I’ve been working under. When I read Twilight, imaginatively attend to Edward Cullen, and feel desirous and fearful at the same time of him, for example, could it be that I’m using properties to “select” out Edward Cullen—where when I imagine these properties, they are properties I’ve remembered or grasp from reality (e.g., certain properties of real-life guys), and so while they contribute to my consciousness of Edward Cullen (and then my emotions are responding to these real-life properties), I end up in a position of being unable to clearly access these properties (like the young toddler having trouble naming the color of the ball)? This is all extremely speculative.
Another favorite paper is “Attention and iconic memory” by Ian Phillips. He tackles the question of whether we can trust subject reports about what they’ve seen in a scene (that had been presented but is now retracted) as reflecting merely what they can remember, or as reflecting the entire extent of what they had managed to experience or become conscious of regarding that scene in the first place? An experimental paradigm by Sperling has driven much debate on this issue. Subjects are presented with a display of letters on a grid (3x4), which is given to them for 15-500 ms. Then, they’re asked to report as many of the letters as possible. They report on average 4.3 letters correctly. Instead, if subjects are trained to associate a certain tone sound with a certain row, and right after the display is retracted a certain tone plays, the subject report on average 3.04 per row (and so if that’s multiplied by the columns, that’s like 12 letters that could be correctly identified, one might think). Thinkers debate over whether this means that subjects in general experience like 12 letters accurately, and they just fail to be able to recall every item they experienced.
Phillips argues that we shouldn’t draw this conclusion. Although the tone is played after the display is retracted, Phillips points to literature that affirms the view that of stimuli A and B, where B is presented subsequently to A, it is possible for B to significantly affect how or whether A is experienced at all. This sort of backwards causation, to put it poetically or metaphorically, is called “perceptual postdiction” in the empirical literature. Given this fact about the temporality of experience, Phillips argues that we can’t assume that the subjects in general experience 12 letters accurately, in the test case where they can report 3 letters accurately after the tone is given. The tone could “retroactively” transform or modulate the conscious experience of the display that was given antecedently to that tone, such that, only once the tone is played, the subject comes to consciously experience the letters of the relevant row. But that does not mean that the subject could also experience the letters of all rows, with or without that tone cue. So, it remains possible that what subjects can report plumbs the depths of what they can experience, contrary to popular opinion.
Here’s a particularly vivid example of postdiction. If a 1000 hz frequency is played for 8–10 ms, it sounds like a tone. Below that limit, the stimulus is heard as a click. For certain subjects whose auditory processing is slightly handicapped, the tone must play 500 ms or more in order to sound like a tone. Otherwise, below that limit, it sounds like a click. Very interestingly when these subjects hear the 500 ms tone, they are totally obvious of or simply do not hear in the first place any “click” that could’ve happened during the duration of 0-400 ms. This indicates that the later stimulus (e.g., the tone played from 400-500 ms) has postdictive effects on the earlier stimulus (e.g., the tone played from 0-400 ms). This earlier stimulus gets transformed from a click into a tone in consciousness, as if it were a tone all along in the past, so there is no trace of the click it once was, one might say. (The citation for this is Creel, Boomsliter, and Powers (1970)).
I had never heard of postdiction before. I find this fascinating. (I also loved Phillips’ writing and argumentative style and intend now to read more by him). I’ve been thinking about how when we have an emotion, we’re sensing the significance of some part of reality that we’re emotionally responding to or that has piqued an interest of ours. I’ve been speculating that the significance unfolds or “blossoms” over time (or to use another metaphor: a lump of clay gets sculpting and made more articulate) as we engage in the feedback loop of attending further to the thing under consideration, having it pique new/more interests, and attending further to that thing in light of new aspects of its significance made available by new interests thus piqued. This is an extremely speculative and sloppy thought, but the fact that the mind is capable of postdiction could have implications for how I should understand this process I’ve been thinking about. It can be very difficult to remember all that we’ve experienced regarding what our emotion is about as this emotion unfolds perhaps because continuous postdiction-based effects keep on “rewriting” what we’re conscious of. This is just one potential implications; I’d like to think about this issue more.
In “Attention and Integration,” a major contemporary psychologist on attention Alan Allport sketches out the history of how psychologists have conceptualized attention and proposes his view as the alternative. Over this history, most have thought of attention as referring to a set of different attentional mental capacities (e.g., alerting, orienting, executive control, resolving conflicting information or impulses) that each are to be identified with a certain causal process or constraint. The main dispute among these thinkers is whether attention is to be thought of as causal process or a constraint on other causal mental processes (e.g., a sort of “bottleneck” located either early or late on a mental process, like visual processing). In other words, some thinkers regard attention as essentially relational (it can be defined only in relation to some other mental faculty) or as not.
Allport traces this disagreement to theorists’ having one of two distinct conceptions of attention. First, attention can be a state of the whole organism (e.g., it is I who can direct my attention or have my attention directed). Second, attention can be a constraint associated with some subpersonal mental mechanism or some part of my mind (e.g., there is a limit as to how many items my memory can retain). When attention is conceptualized under this second description, the question arises of what or who is responsible for controlling the allocation of attention. Then, most psychologists posit some higher-order control system or central executive to fulfill this role (which is still subpersonal and distinct from the “whole organism” or that which is picked out when one first-personally uses “I”).
Against these ways of thinking, Allport thinks, in contrast, that attention is “an emergent property” of psychological processing. Moreover, he asks us to think that there aren’t distinct kinds of attentional capacities (e.g., the higher-order control system and first-order bottlenecks), but what might appear as such distinct kinds are just different implementations of one and the same capacity, where each implementation, then, can be described as having its own function. In brief, the one basic capacity pertains to the relationship between me and the object I’m attending to; then, the subpersonal functions associated with attention should be thought of as capturing different functions of attention in this basic sense.
There are implications of Allport’s view. For example, a debate that could be had is whether Treisman et al. are right that feature integration in visual processing requires the use of attention, or whether it precedes and makes possible attention. Allport thinks that attention is the outcome of such integration processes, given that attention is a person-level relation between self and object, whereas such integration happens at a subpersonal level.
In “The metaphysics of attention” Christopher Mole argues that we shouldn’t think of attention as consisting in any given mental process that can be identified with a region of the brain. Instead, attention is a higher-order mental phenomenon; Mole uses “adverbialism” (a position in philosophy of perception) to make sense of it. Attention is not an object in the mind, but when we talk of attention, in fact we talk about a manner or way by which certain activities are executed by parts of the mind. (I had trouble understanding what’s really at stake here… Mole claims his view satisfactorily responds to the problem that we use “attention” to talk about too many diverse aspects of the mind, and while that may be the case, surely one can reject his view and still satisfactorily respond to this so-called problem).
In “Attention as structuring of the stream of consciousness” Sebastian Watzl proposes that attention is a unified mental phenomenon that consists in “structuring one’s stream of consciousness.” He spends time explaining what the structure of this stream consists in, in contrast to what might be thought of as items “in” the stream or “mental contents.” He proposes that any attentional process ultimately consists in our making some item more “central” relative to another item, which then is more “peripheral.” I found this paper strange. Watzl doesn’t really argue for anything; he just uses examples to motivate his claims. Moreover, I think we have reason to doubt that his proposal could work. It appears that when we use attention in sensory perception and in thought, it operates in significantly different ways. Namely, in sensory perception, it is useful to make sense of all aspects of one’s visual field “already there,” such that items can be compared with regards to how peripheral v center they are under one’s attention. But in contrast, thought is temporally unfolding, one might say. By attending to something of thought, we enact, make possible, or change what unfolds next. So items are not all laid out “in advance” and can’t be compared on the metric Watzl raises.
Also, noticeably, Watzl’s picture of attention makes it very awkward, if not incoherent, to accommodate an intuitive feature of attention. Namely, the way we attend to something can “transform” what “meaning” that thing has—where it seems ontologically inappropriate to talk about that thing of attention and the aspects of its meaning as all “items” on a par with one another that can vary on the dimension of centrality/peripherality. For example, when I attend to L., there is his physical form I sensorily perceive, but when I attend to him with interest or desire, various facets about who he is, or whom I take him to be, appear to contribute to my conscious experience of him. To force talking about all these aspects contributing to my experience as “items” of my attention has the following unacceptable consequence. Whenever we talk of an object as an “item,” (e.g., a person, a book, a table), it is selected as a numerically self-identical thing that is distinguished from other things in its vicinity (e.g., the ground beneath L’s feet, or the sky behind his head). Unless we get real ad-hoc about it, it appears then that we’d need to make sense of aspects of the meaning of a person or object as also distinguished from other potential aspects of meaning. As a whole, this appears to require a certain determinacy or even “atomism” of units of meaning. But the meaning I’m talking about does not appear to be renderable like that. I’m not making claims about the world, and so there are no (compositional) propositions of my thought, when I simply attend to L in such a way that various facets of who he is come to the fore.
Watzl might want to consign these so-called meanings as having roles that pertain to the ‘structure’ rather than ‘content’ of consciousness. But doing this would open more questions than it would solve. How are compare the sense of centrality/peripherality that holds between items “in” consciousness and the sense of centrality/peripherality that holds between an item “in” consciousness and something else (what is it?) that is “outside” of consciousness and rather pertains to its structuring?
One of my favorite papers in this anthology addresses this sort of issue, John Campbell’s “Visual attention and the epistemic role of consciousness.” He opens this paper up with the question of why do we need conscious experience in order for us to gain knowledge of the world (as opposed to our just receiving non-experiential causal impacts by the world)? He answers this by arguing for a distinction and a certain thesis about it. Campbell distinguishes between two distinct roles that a property can play under our attention: a property can (1) serve as the basis upon which we select an object or region of our visual field in the first place, or (2) serve as that which we can “label” or “access” about an object/region that we’ve already selected. There are disputes that could be had over the relationship between attention and consciousness; are they interdependent, or not, for example? Campbell shoes that attention understood in the sense of (1) can be identified with consciousness.
There’s a naive intuition that what we sensorily experience “exceeds” what we can say about it. There seems to be many teeming sensory details of our experience which we lose out on when we try to make sense of what we’re experiencing by using concepts and words. Campbell argues that this intuition derives from the fact that our cognition can use various properties as the basis for selecting objects, when in so doing and come to perceive a certain object, we do so while lacking being in the position to access the relevant property. For example, young toddlers have remarkable trouble learning color words when they already know many other sorts of words. Arguably, they can attend to particular objects on the basis of their colors (e.g., see a ball as distinct from the wall and the rest of the room around it because the ball is red, when the wall is beige), while they are unable to say that the ball is red. Campbell proposes that we think of being conscious as associated with this level of awareness or attentiveness, which we can have independently of being in the position to “access” the relevant properties and thus are also unable to make claims as to what features the objects we attend to have (“a is F”).
This yields a compelling way to make sense of what it might mean to say that something is “in” the so-called “stream of consciousness” as opposed to is part of its “structuring.” Within the personal level, there are relatively latent/unconscious and explicit/conscious aspects of it, where the difference depends upon whether a certain aspect arises from our using a property to select an object vs. from our having labeled it.
Campbell applies his view to understanding certain issues about perceptual justification. Some thinkers, like Johannes Roessler, think that we lack a stable conception of perceptual justification. Campbell argues that this appearance of instability results from our failure to distinguish between two senses of what it is we perceive (e.g., “perceptual contents”), which correspond to the two roles that a visual property can play sketched out above, (1) and (2). Once we stick with (1) as defining perceptual content (giving us a “sparse” view), we can see that the role of perception might not be to give us knowledge at all. Rather, its role is to give us objects we’ve selected, which then, we can go on (and using thought perhaps) attribute properties to and make claims about—and only then we can find perceptual knowledge in the sense usually talked about. To apply this to the famous example of chicken sexers, a chicken sewer may be conscious of the chick in such a way that he can call it a chick, and he is also conscious of the sex of the chick—but in a different way. The property of the chick of its sex is registered by him only in such a way that it can be used as the basis for selecting relevant objects or regions (e.g., putting the chick in one basket rather than the other).
I found this paper interesting. I’ve been thinking about the distinction between latent and explicit consciousness, but just not specifically with regards to perceptual consciousness, and rather in a way that includes the things that are present by virtue of our having relevant thoughts, feelings, and emotions. I’m not sure whether Campbell’s account here could be extended to this context I’ve been working under. When I read Twilight, imaginatively attend to Edward Cullen, and feel desirous and fearful at the same time of him, for example, could it be that I’m using properties to “select” out Edward Cullen—where when I imagine these properties, they are properties I’ve remembered or grasp from reality (e.g., certain properties of real-life guys), and so while they contribute to my consciousness of Edward Cullen (and then my emotions are responding to these real-life properties), I end up in a position of being unable to clearly access these properties (like the young toddler having trouble naming the color of the ball)? This is all extremely speculative.
Another favorite paper is “Attention and iconic memory” by Ian Phillips. He tackles the question of whether we can trust subject reports about what they’ve seen in a scene (that had been presented but is now retracted) as reflecting merely what they can remember, or as reflecting the entire extent of what they had managed to experience or become conscious of regarding that scene in the first place? An experimental paradigm by Sperling has driven much debate on this issue. Subjects are presented with a display of letters on a grid (3x4), which is given to them for 15-500 ms. Then, they’re asked to report as many of the letters as possible. They report on average 4.3 letters correctly. Instead, if subjects are trained to associate a certain tone sound with a certain row, and right after the display is retracted a certain tone plays, the subject report on average 3.04 per row (and so if that’s multiplied by the columns, that’s like 12 letters that could be correctly identified, one might think). Thinkers debate over whether this means that subjects in general experience like 12 letters accurately, and they just fail to be able to recall every item they experienced.
Phillips argues that we shouldn’t draw this conclusion. Although the tone is played after the display is retracted, Phillips points to literature that affirms the view that of stimuli A and B, where B is presented subsequently to A, it is possible for B to significantly affect how or whether A is experienced at all. This sort of backwards causation, to put it poetically or metaphorically, is called “perceptual postdiction” in the empirical literature. Given this fact about the temporality of experience, Phillips argues that we can’t assume that the subjects in general experience 12 letters accurately, in the test case where they can report 3 letters accurately after the tone is given. The tone could “retroactively” transform or modulate the conscious experience of the display that was given antecedently to that tone, such that, only once the tone is played, the subject comes to consciously experience the letters of the relevant row. But that does not mean that the subject could also experience the letters of all rows, with or without that tone cue. So, it remains possible that what subjects can report plumbs the depths of what they can experience, contrary to popular opinion.
Here’s a particularly vivid example of postdiction. If a 1000 hz frequency is played for 8–10 ms, it sounds like a tone. Below that limit, the stimulus is heard as a click. For certain subjects whose auditory processing is slightly handicapped, the tone must play 500 ms or more in order to sound like a tone. Otherwise, below that limit, it sounds like a click. Very interestingly when these subjects hear the 500 ms tone, they are totally obvious of or simply do not hear in the first place any “click” that could’ve happened during the duration of 0-400 ms. This indicates that the later stimulus (e.g., the tone played from 400-500 ms) has postdictive effects on the earlier stimulus (e.g., the tone played from 0-400 ms). This earlier stimulus gets transformed from a click into a tone in consciousness, as if it were a tone all along in the past, so there is no trace of the click it once was, one might say. (The citation for this is Creel, Boomsliter, and Powers (1970)).
I had never heard of postdiction before. I find this fascinating. (I also loved Phillips’ writing and argumentative style and intend now to read more by him). I’ve been thinking about how when we have an emotion, we’re sensing the significance of some part of reality that we’re emotionally responding to or that has piqued an interest of ours. I’ve been speculating that the significance unfolds or “blossoms” over time (or to use another metaphor: a lump of clay gets sculpting and made more articulate) as we engage in the feedback loop of attending further to the thing under consideration, having it pique new/more interests, and attending further to that thing in light of new aspects of its significance made available by new interests thus piqued. This is an extremely speculative and sloppy thought, but the fact that the mind is capable of postdiction could have implications for how I should understand this process I’ve been thinking about. It can be very difficult to remember all that we’ve experienced regarding what our emotion is about as this emotion unfolds perhaps because continuous postdiction-based effects keep on “rewriting” what we’re conscious of. This is just one potential implications; I’d like to think about this issue more.
tbr-pile
September 21, 2011I've been thanked in the acknowledgements so I suppose I shall have to read it.
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