Hostname: page-component-76d6cb85b7-5qg8f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-07-15T10:34:26.085Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Overflow, access, and attention

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 March 2008

Ned Block
Ned Block
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, New York University, New York, NY 10003. ned.block@nyu.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this response to 32 commentators, I start by clarifying the overflow argument. I explain why the distinction between generic and specific phenomenology is important and why we are justified in acknowledging specific phenomenology in the overflow experiments. Other issues discussed are the relations among report, cognitive access, and attention; panpsychic disaster; the mesh between psychology and neuroscience; and whether consciousness exists.

Information

Type
Author’s Response
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 30 , Issue 5-6 , December 2007 , pp. 530 - 548
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Abrams, R. L. & Grinspan, J. (2007) Unconscious semantic priming in the absence of partial awareness. Consciousness and Cognition 16:942–53.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Alter, T. & Walter, S. (2006) Phenomenal concepts and phenomenal knowledge: New essays on consciousness and physicalism. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Alvarez, G. A. & Oliva, A. (in press) The representation of ensemble visual features outside the focus of attention. Psychological Science.Google Scholar
Armstrong, D. M. (1968) A materialist theory of the mind, Humanities Press.Google Scholar
Baars, B. & Franklin, S. (2003) How conscious experience and working memory interact. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17(4):166–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Block, N. (1983) The photographic fallacy in the debate about mental imagery. Nous 17:651–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Block, N. (1995b) On a confusion about a function of consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18(2):227–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Block, N. (2001) Paradox and cross purposes in recent work on consciousness. Cognition 79(1–2):197–220.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Block, N. (2002) Concepts of consciousness. In: Philosophy of mind: Classical and contemporary readings, ed. Chalmers, D., pp. 206–18. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Block, N. (2005) Two neural correlates of consciousness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9(2):46–52.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Block, N. (2007) Remarks on chauvinism and the mind-body problem. In: Consciousness, function, and representation, vol. 1, ed. Block, N., pp. 7–12. MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Block, N. (in press) Functional reduction. In: Supervenience in mind, ed. Horgan, T., Sabates, M. H. & Sosa, D., MIT Press.Google Scholar
Brockmole, J. R., Wang, R. F. & Irwin, D. E. (2002) Temporal integration between visual images and visual percepts. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 28(2):315–34.Google ScholarPubMed
Carruthers, P. (1989) Brute experience. Journal of Philosophy 86:258–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carruthers, P. (1992) The animals issue: Moral theory in practice. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carruthers, P. (1999) Sympathy and subjectivity. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 77:465–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caston, V. (2002) Aristotle on consciousness. Mind 111(444):751–815.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cavanagh, P., He, S. & Intriligator, J. (1999) Attentional resolution: The grain and locus of visual awareness. In: Neuronal basis and psycological aspects of consciousness, ed. Taddai-Ferretti, C., Musio, C.. World Scientific.Google Scholar
Cowan, N. (2005) Working-memory capacity limits in a theoretical context. In: Human learning and memory: Advances in theory and applications, ed. Izawa, C. & Ohta, N., pp. 155–75. Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Cowan, N. (in press) What are the differences between long-term, short-term, and working memory? In: The essence of memory, ed. Sossin, W., Jacaille, J.-C., Castellucci, V. F. & Belleville, S.. Elsevier/Academic Press.Google Scholar
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1975) Beyond boredom and anxiety. Jossey-Bass.Google Scholar
Darden, L. & Tabery, J. (2007) Molecular biology. In: The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2007 edition), ed. Zalta, E. N.. Online publication. Available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2007/entries/molecular-biology.Google Scholar
Debner, J. A. & Jacoby, L. L. (1994) Unconscious perception: Attention, awareness, and control. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 20:304–17.Google ScholarPubMed
Dehaene, S., Changeux, J.-P., Naccache, L., Sackur, J. & Sergant, C. (2006) Conscious, preconscious, and subliminal processing: A testable taxonomoy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10(5):204–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dennett, D. C. (1991) Consciousness explained. Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Feigenson, L. & Carey, S. (2003) Tracking individuals via object files: Evidence from infants' manual search. Developmental Science 6:568–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feigenson, L. & Carey, S. (2005) On the limits of infants’ quantification of small object arrays. Cognition 97(3):295–313.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Feigenson, L., Carey, S. & Hauser, M. (2002) The representations underlying infants’ choice of more: Object files versus analog magnitudes. Psychological Science 13:150–56.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goldberg, I. I., Harel, M. & Malach, R. (2006) When the brain loses its self: Prefrontal inactivation during sensorimotor processing. Neuron 50(2):329–39.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hasson, U., Nir, Y., Levy, I., Fuhrmann, G. & Malach, R. (2004) Intersubject synchronization of cortical activity during natural vision. Science 303(5664):1634–40.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Huang, L. & Pashler, H. (2007) A Boolean map theory of visual attention. Psychological Review 114(3):599–631.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Huang, L., Treisman, A. & Pashler, H. (2007) Characterizing the limits of human visual awareness. Science 317:823–25.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jiang, Y., Costello, P., Fang, F., Huang, M. & He, S. (2006) A gender- and sexual orientation-dependent spatial attentional effect of invisible images. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 103:17048–52.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kentridge, R. W., Heywood, C. A. & Weiskrantz, L. (1999) Attention without awareness in blindsight. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London: Biological Sciences 266(1430):1805–11.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kentridge, R. W., Heywood, C. A. & Cowey, A. (2004) Chromatic edges, surfaces, and constancies in cerebral achromatopsia. Neuropsychologia 42(6):821–30.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Koch, C. & Tsuchiya, N. (2007) Attention and consciousness: Two distinct brain processes. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11:16–22.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kosslyn, S. M., Thompson, W. L. & Ganis, G. (2006) The case for mental imagery. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kouider, S., Dehaene, S., Jobert, A. & Le Bihan, D. (2007) Cerebral bases of subliminal and supraliminal priming during reading. Cerebral Cortex 17(9):2019–29.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kouider, S. & Dupoux, E. (2004) Partial awareness creates the “illusion” of subliminal semantic priming. Psychological Science 15(2):75–81.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kouider, S. & Dupoux, E. (2007) How “semantic” is response priming restricted to practiced items? A reply to Abrams & Grinspan (2007). Consciousness and Cognition 16:954–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Landman, R., Spekreijse, H. & Lamme, V. A. F. (2003) Large capacity storage of integrated objects before change blindness. Vision Research 43(2):149–64.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Locke, J. (1689/1975) An essay concerning human understanding. Clarenda Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Loftus, G. & Irwin, D. (1998) On the relations among different measures of visible and informational persistence. Cognitive Psychology 35:135–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lumer, E. D. & Rees, G. (1999) Covariation of activity in visual and prefrontal cortex associated with subjective visual perception. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 96(4):1669–73.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lycan, W. (1996) Consciousness and experience. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Lycan, W. (2004) The superiority of HOP to HOT. In: Higher-order theories of consciousness, ed. Gennaro, R., pp. 93–114. John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McConkie, G. W. & Rayner, K. (1975) The span of the effective stimulus during a fixation in reading. Perception and Psychophysics 17:578–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McConkie, G. W. & Zola, D. (1979) Is visual information integrated across successive fixations in reading? Perception and Psychophysics 25:221–24.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Milner, A. D. & Goodale, M. A. (2008) Two visual systems re-viewed. Neuropsychologia 46:774–85.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mullen, K. T. (1992) Colour vision as a post-receptoral specialization of the central visual field. Vision Research 31(1):119–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prinz, J. J. (2000) A neurofunctional theory of visual consciousness. Consciousness and Cognition 9(2):243–59.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Prinz, J. J. (2005) A neurofunctional theory of consciousness. In: Cognition and the brain: Philosophy and the neuroscience movement, ed. Brook, A. & Akins, K., pp. 381–96. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Qiu, J. (2006) Does it hurt? Nature 444(9):143–45.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Raichle, M. E., MacLeod, A. M., Snyder, A. Z., Powers, W. J., Gusnard, D. A. & Shulman, G. L. (2001) A default mode of brain function. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 98(2):676–82.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rosenberg, A. (2005) Philosophy of science: A contemporary introduction. Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sergent, C. & Dehaene, S. (2004) Is consciousness a gradual phenomenon? Evidence for an all-or-none bifurcation during the attentional blink. Psychological Science 15:720–28.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sligte, I. G., Scholte, H. S. & Lamme, V. A. F. (2008) Are there multiple visual short-term memory stores? Plos One 3(2):1–9.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Snodgrass, M. (2002) Disambiguating conscious and unconscious inferences: Do exclusion paradigms demonstrate unconscious perception? American Journal of Psychology 115:545–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sommerville, J. A., Woodward, A. L. & Needham, A. (2005) Action experience alters 3-month-old infants’ perception of others’ actions. Cognition 96:B1–B11.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sperling, G. (1960) The information available in brief visual presentations. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied 74(11, Whole No. 498):1–29. [Whole issue.]CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supèr, H., Spekreijse, H. & Lamme, V. A. F. (2001a) A neural correlate of working memory in the monkey primary visual cortex. Science 293:120–24.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Taddio, A., Goldbach, M., Ipp, M., Stevens, B. & Koren, G. (1995) Effect of neonatal circumcision on pain responses during vaccination in boys. The Lancet 345(8945):291–92.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Treisman, A., Russell, R. & Green, J. (1975) Brief visual storage of shape and movement. In: Attention and performance, ed. Dornic, S. & Rabbitt, P., pp. 699–721. Academic Press.Google Scholar
Tse, P. U., Martinez-Conde, S., Schlegel, A. A. & Macknik, S. L. (2005) Visibility, visual awareness and visual masking of simple unattended targets are confined to areas in the occipital cortex beyond human V1/V2. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 102:17178–83.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Verfaellie, M., Milberg, W. P., McGlinchey-Berroth, R., Grande, L. & D'Esposito, M. (1995) Comparison of cross-field matching and forced-choice identification in hemispatial neglect. Neuropsychology 9:427–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Volpe, B. T., LeDoux, J. E. & Gazzaniga, M. S. (1979) Information processing of visual stimuli in an extinguished field. Nature 282:722–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar