8 Model 6:

Attention as control of access to

.
consciousness

8.0 Introduction: Attention versus consciousness

Common sense makes a distinction between attention and consciousness.
In everyday English we may ask someone to "please pay attention" to
something, but not to "please be conscious" of it. Yet we know that when
people pay attention to something they do become conscious of it.
Likewise, we can "draw," "get," or "call" someone's attention invol-
untarily by shouting, waving, or prodding the person; as soon as we
succeed, our subject becomes conscious of us. Nevertheless, we still do
not speak of "getting" or "drawing" someone's consciousness.
It seems as if the psychology of common sense conceives of attention
as something more active than consciousness, while consciousness itself
is thought of as a "state." A similar distinction is implied in pairs of verbs
like looking versus seeing, listening versus hearing, touching versus
feeling, and so forth. In each case the primary sense of the first verb is
more active, purposeful, and attentional, while the second verb refers to
the conscious experience itself. Nor is this distinction limited to percep-
tion: It also works for memory, as in recalling versus remembering; even
in the case of imagination, the verb imagining is more active and
purposeful than daydreaming.
Of course consciousness is profoundly active, even when it is not
experienced as such, and we have previously suggested that superficially
purposeless thoughts may in fact serve specific goals (6.0). But the
commonsense distinction between attention and consciousness is still
important. It embodies the insight that there are attentional control
mechanisms for access to consciousness - both voluntary and automatic
that determine what will or will not become conscious. It implies that
attention involves metacognitive operations that guide the stream of
consciousness.
This belief is backed by good evidence. We can obviously control what
we will be conscious of in a number of voluntary ways: We can decide

301