Forthcoming in Philosophical Issues

Attention, Seeing, and Change Blindness

Here are two crowds of balls (from Dretske 2010):

View crowd A first and then view crowd B, each for a second or two. If you are like
most people, you will fail to notice any difference in the crowds. But there is a difference: crowd A has one more ball. This is an example of change blindness. Do you
see the ball that is the difference in the two crowds? You fail to see that there is a
difference in the two crowds, but do you see the extra ball?
The question is significant for three reasons. First, reflection upon it enables
us to understand better the character or texture of visual experience. Secondly (and
relatedly), how we answer the question is tied up with how we handle the further
vexing question of the nature of attention and its relationship to consciousness. Finally, what we say about this case (and others like it) is relevant to how we think
about the vehicles of consciousness awareness the conscious states in our heads
that are directed at things outside us.
My discussion is divided into eight parts. I begin with a discussion of seeing
and visual consciousness. In Section 2, I relate this discussion to the crowd of balls
example and the issue of change blindness. I argue that the view Fred Dretske takes
of this case (and others like it) is mistaken. Section 3 takes up the topic of levels of
representation involved in visual awareness. I distinguish here two different general hypotheses with respect to change blindness the comparison failure hypothesis
and the representational failure hypothesis and I adjudicate between them. The
next three sections are concerned with various aspects of attention and the relationship of attention to seeing. Section 7 turns to the nature of the vehicles of conscious
awareness. The final section addresses the general question of whether we see all
the things in the field of view that are large enough to see. It is suggested that on

one reading of this question we do but that on another reading we often fail to see
things in plain view that are large enough for us to see.
1. What is seeing?
In ordinary English, we use the term see both with respect to objects and with respect to facts. We talk of seeing tables, chairs, trees, stars and people, for example.
We also describe one another as seeing that the table is covered with books, that the
chair is made of wood, that the tree has acorns on it, and so on. Chisholm (1957),
Drestke (1969) and Jackson (1977), among others, have argued that there is a genuine distinction reflected in our talk here: seeing things is not reducible to seeing
that things are thus-and-so. We see things and we see facts.
That there really is a difference between thing seeing and fact seeing is illustrated by cases such as the following: suppose that a white cube is bathed in red
light. It looks red to Paul, who is viewing it. Paul cannot see that the cube is red; for
the cube is white. Perhaps the cube also looks straight ahead when in reality it is off
to the right and Paul is seeing it in a mirror placed at a forty-five degree orientation
in front of Paul. Perhaps, the cube looks irregular in its shape in virtue of an apparent shape distortion brought about by the mirror. Paul does not see that the cube is
off to the right; not does he see that the object he is viewing has a cubical shape.
Still, Paul does see the cube.
The general point here is that one can see an object O without there being
any property, P, such that one sees that O has P or without there being any property,
P, such that one sees with respect to O that it has P. This is indicated by the cube example and other such cases of ubiquitous error.
So, not all seeing is seeing that. But what is it to see a thing? In the phenomenal sense of the term see, one sees a thing just in case ones visual experience
makes one visually conscious of it. Arguably, see has other senses too. Zombie
replicas of human beings are conceptually possible, according to many philosophers,
and it does not seem clearly wrong to say that they see things even though they undergo no experiences. Take also the case of a simple surveillance robot programmed to detect activity in a yard. A thief might be intent on getting across the
yard without being seen by the surveillance robot. In being so intent, the man is not
committed to supposing that the robot has experiences. He simply assumes that if
he is registered or detected by the robot eyes then he is seen and the game is up. In
this sense of see, blindsight subjects may be said to see the items in their blind
fields, since they evidently do detect or register some stimuli there, as witnessed by
their correct guesses about those stimuli.1
People with blindsight have large blind areas or scotoma in their visual fields, due
to brain damage in the post-geniculate region (typically the occipital cortex), and
yet, under certain circumstances, they can issue accurate statements with respect to
the contents of those areas. See Weiskrantz 1986. For example, in forced choice
tests, blindsight subjects can make accurate guesses with respect to such things as
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When I use the term see I shall be using it with its phenomenal sense. My
concern thus will be with what might be called conscious seeing. It is evident that
neither the blindsight subject, nor the surveillance robot nor the zombie consciously
see anything.
If we suppose that seeing a thing is a matter of undergoing a visual experience that makes one conscious of that thing, we must now face the question of
what is involved in being conscious of a thing. Evidently, I can be conscious of a
thing without being able to identify the thing, as the cube example above shows.
Think too of being conscious of a thing located on the other side of thick, distorting
darkened glass. I might be able to see the thing and track its movements without
having the faintest idea what it is.
Still even if I cant identify a thing, if I am conscious of it then it must be
marked out or differentiated in the phenomenology of my experience. For suppose
that it is not. Then I wont even be able to mentally point to the thing on the basis of
my experience. So, my experience alone does not enable me even so much as to
wonder What is that? with respect to the thing. Nor, does my experience alone
enable me directly to form beliefs or make judgments about the thing. The thing
thus is hidden from me. I am blind to it. I am not conscious of the relevant thing.
So when am I conscious of a thing? The above remarks suggest the following
test: I am conscious of a thing just in case my experience has a phenomenal character directly on the basis of which I can at least ask myself Whats that? with respect
to the thing (or form some singular belief about it).2
Here is another way to motivate the above test. Consider a perfectly camouflaged moth on a tree trunk. The moth is in plain view. Do I see it? What about the
blob of white-out on the page of white paper? I have no idea where it is on the paper, as I hold the page before me. Do I see it?
presence, position, orientation, and movement of visual stimuli. They can also guess
correctly as to whether an X is present or an O. Some blindsight patients can even
issue accurate guesses with respect to colors in the blind field.
2 This test, as stated, oversimplifies minimally. Suppose, for example, you put your
head around the door of my office and ask me if Id like to go to lunch. I see your
head. Do I also see you? Intuitively I do. Cases like this can be handled either by
modifying the test so that the demonstrative is permitted to pick out some sufficiently large or salient part of the relevant thing or by arguing that the demonstrative can be applied directly to the thing even though only part of it is in the field of
view. Either way, it is admitted that there is a context-dependent dimension to seeing things.
As for the case of simple creatures without the capacity to form propositional
attitudes, I deny that they see things around them (in the relevant sense of see). I
do not deny, of course, that such creatures may register or detect things in their environments and thus see them in a weaker sense. (Those who are not as liberal in
the ascription of propositional attitudes as I may wish to hold instead that the test,
as proposed, is only for creatures capable of forming beliefs, etc.)
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It seems to me that the natural, intuitive view to take is that I am not conscious of either the perfectly camouflaged moth or the blob of white-out. But why
not? In the moth case, surely I am not conscious of the moth because my visual experience is not about the moth at all. The moth is not a component or constituent of
the content of my visual experience.
It might be replied that this is mere prejudice. My experience is about the
moth. But then how does my experience latch onto the moth? After all, the moth is
not marked out or differentiated in the phenomenology of my experience. I cannot
mentally point to it. So, I cant even ask myself Whats that? with respect to the
moth directly on the basis of my experience. Surely, the right thing to say is that I
am not conscious of the moth.
Not everyone will be convinced. Suppose that the moth covers a bright purple postage stamp stuck to the tree trunk. The moth blocks my view of the postage
stamp. But if the moth blocks my view, I must see it.
This is too fast. In general, the presence of a blocker with respect to a perceptual experience does not license the conclusion that the blocker is perceptually
experienced. The earplugs I am wearing block my hearing the sound my alarm clock
is emitting. But I dont hear the earplugs. The taste paste I have smeared on my
tongue prevents me from tasting the chocolate I am eating but I do not (or need not)
taste the taste paste.
Of course, in denying that the moth is seen, I am not denying that light reflected from the moth carries information that reaches the eyes. My claim is that the
moth is not seen in the phenomenal sense of the term see. There is no conscious or
phenomenal representation of the moth.
But what if there are three different moths hidden on the tree trunk? Again
my view is that there is no moth that I see. Of course, if there are lots of moths and
they line up perfectly with one another so that they cover the entire tree trunk, then
I do see a blanket of moths though I misidentify the thing I am seeing as a tree trunk.
Still even in this case I fail to see individual moths.3
Here is one more example. Fixate your eyes upon the plus sign in the middle
of the figure below.

What if I decide to focus on a particular unmarked-out region of the tree trunk that
(as it happens) is filled by a perfectly camouflaged moth? Still, in my view, I do not
see the moth; for the moth is not differentiated in the phenomenology of my experience. If I ask myself Whats that? with respect to the region I am focusing upon,
there is nothing in the phenomenal character of my visual experience itself that directly enables me to apply the demonstrative concept.
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You certainly see each bar on the left. What about each bar on the right? If you
think you see each such bar, tell me how many bars there are on the right without
moving your fixation point. You wont be able to do it (as you can with the bars on
the left). Why not? Surely because it is not the case that each bar on the right is
clearly marked out or differentiated in the phenomenology of your experience. But
then surely even though you are conscious of the bars on the right, it is not true that
you are conscious of each individual bar.
This is the result delivered by my earlier proposal. You see the bars you are
visually conscious of them since the phenomenal character of your visual experience, as you stare at the central dot, directly enables you to ask with respect to the
bars collectively Are they parallel? (for example). But consider the sixth bar away
from the plus sign on the right. As you fixate on the plus sign, you cannot mentally
point to it. You cannot apply the concept that bar to it directly on the basis of the
phenomenal character of your experience (without changing your fixation point).
So, you do not see it.
Ned Block has objected to me that the case of the bars exposes my test for
seeing a thing as ad hoc. For while it is true that the phenomenal character of ones
experience does not enable one to attend to the sixth bar in the middle of the group
of bars on the right of the plus sign if one keeps ones eyes fixated on the plus sign, it
does enable one to do this, if one moves one's eyes appropriately. According to
Block, my choosing the former as what matters to seeing the sixth bar rather than
the latter is ad hoc.
I disagree. In actual fact, by hypothesis ones eyes are fixed on the plus sign.
Given the actual fixation point for ones eyes, ones experience has a certain phenomenal character. That phenomenal character does not enable one to demonstrate
the sixth bar. So, one is not conscious of that bar. One does not see it. Of course, if
one moves ones eyes appropriately so that ones fixation point changes to the sixth
bar, say, the phenomenal character of the experience one then would have would
enable one to attend to the fifth bar. But that phenomenal character is not the same
as the phenomenal character of ones actual experience obtained with ones eyes
fixed on the plus sign.
Perhaps it will be replied that there is an alternative reading of the claim that
the phenomenal character of ones experience enables one to demonstrate the sixth
bar if one move ones eyes which I am ignoring, namely that the phenomenal character of ones actual experience, obtained with ones eyes fixated on the plus sign, is
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such that it enables one to demonstrate the sixth bar, if one moves ones eyes. Given
this reading, the objector may say, it remains ad hoc to suppose that what matters to
the question of whether one sees the sixth bar is whether the phenomenal character
of ones experience, obtained with ones eyes fixated on the plus sign, is such that if
one keeps ones eyes fixated on the plus sign, it enables one to demonstrate the sixth
bar.
Again, I disagree. Consider the claim that my current state of fitness enables
me to run a mile in 6 minutes. What do I mean? That my current state of fitness is
such that if I go on a super-intensive training schedule, it enables me to run a mile in
6 minutes? Or that my current state of fitness, as things are, enables me to run a
mile on 6 minutes? Obviously the latter. On the former reading, it might be true of
someone who was grossly overweight that their current state of fitness enabled
them to run a mile in 6 minutes. That would be a perverse (and ad hoc) interpretation of what is being asserted. Correspondingly, given that ones eyes are fixated on
the plus sign, the right reading of the claim that the phenomenal character of ones
experience enables one to demonstrate the sixth bar is that that phenomenal character enables one to demonstrate the sixth bar, if one keep ones eyes on the plus
sign. And so understood, the claim is false.
My claims about seeing and visual consciousness have counterparts elsewhere. You can weigh the marbles (by placing them on the scale), but you need not
thereby weigh one of the marbles in particular (you may have no idea how much it
weighs). You can think about your colleagues for example, you can think of your
colleagues that they get along well together without thereby thinking of any colleague in particular. Likewise, I claim, you can see the bars without seeing the fifth
bar in particular. See, like weigh and think of, has a collective or non-distributive
character.
I should add that in saying that, with eyes fixated on the plus sign, you do not
see the sixth bar, I am not denying that it contributes to the phenomenology; for had
it been missing or had it been red in color, the phenomenology would undoubtedly
have been different. Equally though had the camouflaged moth been blue or spotted, say, the phenomenology would have been different. Still in actual fact the moth
is not seen. To take a different sort of case, suppose that the falling rocks dent the
car roof. It can be true that if the only rock weighing 4 pounds, say, had not been
present, the rocks would not have dented the car roof, and thus that the 4 pound
rock contributed to the denting, even though that rock individually did not dent the
car roof.4
Here is a further reason to deny that the sixth bar is seen. Fixate on the bars and
point a finger so that its tip is touching the sixth bar. Now move your eyes and hold
them fixed on the central plus sign. Nothing in the phenomenology of your experience will inform you that the finger is touching a bar as opposed to one of the gaps
between bars. But if the location of the sixth bar is marked out in the phenomenology of your experience, equally the location of the finger should be. How then could
the phenomenology leave open whether the finger is touching a bar? The obvious
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Still, dont you know that the sixth bar away on the right that particular bar
-- is black on the basis of your experience (Dretske 2010)? If so, surely you do see it
after all. To this I reply that via your experience you know that the bars on the right
collectively are black and so you are in a position to infer a priori that each particular bar is black. But you dont know that the sixth bar away is black directly on the
basis of the phenomenal character of your experience. Your cognitive attitudes
about the sixth bar in particular arent formed directly in this way. So, you do not
see the sixth bar away.
Suppose now that the bars are real three-dimensional objects instead of picture bars and suppose further that behind one of the black bars is a thinner red bar.
Since you cant tell from your viewpoint whether there is a concealed red bar, you
dont have the collective knowledge that all the bars on the right are black. So, it
may be said, your knowledge that the sixth visible bar away is black cannot derive
from your collective knowledge that all the bars on the right are black.
To this I say the mere possibility of there being a red bar behind one of the
black bars does not undermine your claim to have the collective knowledge that all
the bars are black (any more than various skeptical scenarios undermine ordinary
claims to knowledge). Still suppose that in actual fact there is such a red bar. In that
event, what you know via your experience that all the non-occluded bars on the right
all the bars on the right in plain view -- are black. You also know via your experience that you are seeing more than six bars on the right. So, you are in a position
to infer that the sixth non-occluded bar away is black. Your knowledge here is indirect. You dont see the sixth non-occluded bar away.
2. The crowds of balls
Crowd A has one more ball than crowd B. You dont notice any difference.
Do you see the extra ball in crowd A the ball that is the difference? To make
headway with this question, consider first the famous Seurat picture below and fixate your eyes on the little girl holding some flowers in the middle of the picture.

conclusion to draw is that the location of the sixth bar is not marked out in the phenomenology: you do not see the sixth bar.
This is also supported by the following observation. Fixate on the sixth bar in
and then switch your fixation point to the plus sign. You will find that the sixth bar
effectively disappears as a discrete entity in your experience.
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I predict that, as you do so, you will be unable to attend to the pipe the reclining man
on the left is smoking. For you, it will be as if the pipe is not there and likewise for
the qualities of the pipe, for example, its shape. Being unable to attend to these
things, as you fixate on the little girl, they are hidden from you. You are blind to
them. They are not marked out in the phenomenology of your experience. The
same is true for the fifth vertical bar away from the plus sign in the following figure
as your eyes track down from the top black spots to the lower black spots.
Note however that this is not the case if your eyes take a different path from the plus
sign on the left to the plus signs just below the bars. Here towards the end of the
tracking, each and every bar is clearly marked out in the phenomenology of your
experience. You see each bar.
The point these cases illustrate is that, in general, shifting the fixation point
of your eyes changes the phenomenology of your experience somewhat. With a shift
in eye fixation, you can see things you did not see before.
Returning now to the two crowds, do you see Bill (ball # 43) the extra ball
in crowd A? My answer is that if you view crowd A briefly, you may well not see Bill.
It depends upon how your eyes move. Bill may well be like one of the middle bars in
the group of bars to the right of the plus sign as your eyes move down from the upper black spot to the lower ones. In that case, Bill is only potentially seen: Bill is such
that you would have seen it, if your eyes movements had been suitably different.

Of course, you would also have seen Bill if it had been black instead of grey.
The difference in color between Bill and the other balls would have drawn your attention to Bill just as it would to the fifth bar if it were painted red. But then your
eye movements would have been different as would the phenomenology of your experience.
One philosopher who takes an opposing view of this case is Fred Dretske
(2010). According to Dretske, you do see Bill. He argues as follows:
(1) If S directly sees (and thereby knows) that x is F, then S sees (is conscious
of) x.
(2) People know that Bill (ball #43) is grey by directly seeing that Bill is grey.
So,
(3) People see Bill.
The contentious premise here is (2). Given their actual eye movements, people may
well not directly see that Bill is grey. I grant that people see all the non-occluded
balls (in the collective sense of all). So, I am happy to concede that people see that
the non-occluded balls are grey directly on the basis of their experience. However,
seeing all the non-occluded balls and seeing that all the non-occluded balls are grey
is compatible with not seeing Bill. If people dont see Bill, they dont directly see
that Bill is grey. Rather people see that Bill is grey by inferring that ball #43 Bill
is grey from their knowledge that all the non-occluded balls are grey.
Again: if Bill had been black, people would have spotted it and then seen directly that Bill is black. But, to repeat, their eye movements and experiences would
then have been different. They would have seen a thing they actually may well fail
to see.
If a difference in color of ball #43 would have been spotted right away, must
not people see ball #43? No. What people would have seen is not a reliable indicator of what they actually see. If the perfectly camouflaged moth had been red,
people would have seen it on the tree trunk. But it does not follow that people actually see it. Further, I do not wish to deny that information about each ball and its
color may be represented by the visual system. It is to this topic and its relevance to
change blindness that I turn next.
3. Levels of representation

Evidence that a rich visual representation is generated in viewing a scene

with multiple things in it is provided by an experiment performed by Lamme and
Landman (2003). In this experiment, subjects were presented with three different
scenarios, as shown in the figure below:

In the top scenario, cuing occurs with the presentation of the second scene and subjects are then asked whether the cued item has changed or not. In the middle scenario, cuing occurs with the presentation of the first scene. In the bottom scenario,
cuing occurs after the disappearance of the first scene but before the presentation of
the changed scene. For the middle and bottom scenarios, subjects performance is

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almost 100% correct. In the top scenario, they perform poorly.

It appears, then, that cuing after the first scene but before the second scene
prevents change blindness. This indicates that cuing draws the subjects attention
to one part of the entire scene, even though the scene is no longer present. Thus,
when the cue occurs in the bottom scenario, there must still be a representation of
the entire scene at the time of the cue. Cuing then allows a comparison to be made
between the part of the scene cued and the corresponding part of the second scene.
In the top scenario, there is no cuing until the end. By that time, the initial whole
scene representation has been over-ridden by the second whole scene visual representation, so no comparison is possible. This is why in the top scenario, unlike the
other two, there is change blindness.
The Landman/Lamme experiment, then, strongly suggests that there is a rich
representation of the whole scene/stimulus. Within this representation, there is a
representation of the rectangle that changes its orientation and of the orientation of
that rectangle. With cuing in the grey interval, part of this representation remains
available for comparison with the second scene representation in the bottom scenario; hence the improved performance.
What is represented need not be consciously represented, however. Specifically, it need not be the case that in the Landman/Lamme experiment, each block
orientation is represented at a conscious level. Furthermore, the fact that the whole
scene representation in the Landman/Lamme experiment is rich does not prove
that there is comparable richness in the visual representations of scenes with more
items. Still, the view I am proposing with respect to the crowds of balls can allow for
such richness. That is, it can allow that that the visual system encodes information
about each ball and its color just as it does with respect to each rectangle and its
orientation. In that event, my claim is that, depending upon how the eyes move, it
may well not be the case that there is a conscious representation of each ball.
Where does this leave us with respect to change blindness? My answer is that
for at least some change blindness scenarios, we should accept the REPRESENTATIONAL FAILURE hypothesis at a conscious level as opposed to the COMPARISON
FAILURE hypothesis at that level. The first hypothesis is self-explanatory; the
second is the view that change blindness results not from a failure to see anything in
the field of view but rather from a failure to compare properly conscious representations of the scene before and after the change.
In some cases of change blindness, it seems clear that the comparison failure
hypothesis is correct. Consider, for example, Dan Simons basketball experiment
(2002). In this experiment, a confederate asked an unsuspecting pedestrian on a
college campus for directions. The confederate was (or was not) holding a red and
white basketball. As the pedestrian was giving directions, a group of people walked
behind her and between her and the confederate, and one member of the group removed (or added) the basketball. Fewer than 25% of the participants spontaneously noticed the change. However, when they were cued, an additional 50% reported

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the basketball change, and they were even able to state the unusual color of the basketball.
It seems plausible to suppose that the subjects who recalled the basketball
after the hint were originally conscious of it and its color (in the case that the basketball was present initially). They simply failed to spontaneously compare properly their initial conscious representation of the basketball with their later one.
Another point I want to stress is that in some cases of change blindness -notably ones involving real life scenes -- it may be that not only are some things in
plain view missing at the conscious level but also that others are added. When
shown a scene very quickly, subjects certainly sometimes report the presence of
things that are missing but that are compatible with the character of the scene. For
example, if shown very quickly a picture of a street scene and asked whether the
scene contained a fridge, subjects will deny it but if asked whether there was a fire
hydrant, they often will say yes even though there was no fire hydrant. It seems to
me not at all obvious (and very likely false) that the subjects actually experienced a
fire hydrant in the scene, but there is nothing in my overall view that precludes this
possibility (see here section VII).
I want now to go back to my earlier claim that in the crowd of balls example
Bill (ball #43) may well not be seen, given the actual eye movements. In making this
claim, I am not endorsing the view of ORegan (2000/2001) and others (ORegan
and Noe 2001) that things to which we are not attending are only potentially seen. I
am not supposing that there is a refrigerator light illusion, as it has come to be
called. This is the claim that just as a very unsophisticated person might mistakenly
suppose that the refrigerator light is always on, given that it is on whenever the
fridge door is opened, so we too in supposing in everyday life that there are things
we see to which we are not attending are making a comparable mistake. The fridge
door is only potentially on at all times and we only potentially see things to which
we are not attending. An adequate discussion of this claim requires that we turn our
attention to the topic of attention.
4. Attention: some preliminary remarks
Perhaps the most famous quotation on attention comes from William James.
He wrote:
Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind in
clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible
objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are
of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state. (1890)
James here tells us that attending to an object is a matter of taking possession of it
mentally in clear and vivid form. The natural, intuitive way to express this thought
is as follows: one attends to something just in case one focuses upon it.

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Supposing that attention is a matter of focus, it seems clear that the relevant
focusing is not sense-specific. We can attend to a noise, a flash, a smell, a shape, for
example. We can also attend to spatial regions, but typically we attend to particulars located in space and features of such particulars (e.g. color and shape). Contra
James, there is also evidence that we can attend to more than one thing at a time.
For example, if subjects are presented with an array of eight stationary dots, and
they are told to pay attention to the four dots that flash initially, they can continue to
track those four dots even if all the dots in the array begin moving around in irregular ways.5
Attention can be triggered by external stimuli that pop out (e.g., a red square
in a field of green squares) or begin suddenly (e.g., a flash of light or a loud noise).
This is bottom-up attention. Here (in the visual case) eye fixation and attention automatically go together. Attention can also be triggered by a decision or choice. In
these cases, focus can diverge from fixation. This is top-down attention. Top-down
attention is driven in part by the concepts exercised in the decision to attend.
Here is an example of focus without fixation:

If you fixate and focus on the plus sign in the middle of figure 7, you will be able to
discern which rectangles are lighter in color but not which ones have longer vertical
as opposed to horizontal sides. To discover that, you need to switch your focus to

Not everyone agrees that in tracking the dots one attends to them. See Pylyshyn
2003.
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each rectangle in turn, and this you can do while continuing to fixate on the central
plus sign (Cavanagh et al 1999).
In general, when one attends to a thing, features of the thing are usually revealed of which one was not conscious beforehand. Attention facilitates pattern or
object recognition not just by revealing new features, I might add. It also aids in the
cognitive integration of features into features of single objects and in the combination of parts into wholes (Treisman 1980).
I want next to develop further the proposal that attention is a matter of mental focus. As I have already noted, this proposal fits well with our ordinary ways of
thinking about attention. If I tell you to pay attention to what I am saying, I am asking you to focus upon my remarks. If I switch my attention from the oboe to the
strings, as the orchestra plays, I am switching the focus of my hearing from one to
the other. Or so we ordinarily suppose.
Ryle (1949), nonetheless, opposed the focusing view of attention. He claimed
that when one attends to something one is doing, there are not two activities here
but one done attentively. This is not, in general, true, however. A novice driver may
attend to her driving (as she would that of her instructor) by focusing on the gear
shifts, the position of her feet, etc without thereby driving attentively. Still, we
should agree with Ryle that there is such a thing as attending as an agent. Here one
performs an action A attentively and this is not an amalgam of two separate activities: performing A and attending to A. But there is also such a thing as attending as a
spectator (to ones own action or someone elses or something that is not an action).
This, I maintain, is a matter of ones focusing on that to which one attends.
Furthermore, attending as an agent requires attending as a spectator (though
not to the action one performs). One cannot fish attentively, for example, if one pays
no attention, while one fishes, to things relevant to catching fish and instead attends
to the joyful cries of the children playing nearby or a new game on ones iPhone.
Following Ryle, Alan R. White, a philosopher noted for his ordinary language
distinctions, held that the concept attending is a polymorphous activity concept
(White 1964). What White meant was there are many different activities, the doing
of which can in certain circumstances count as attending and yet none of which in
other circumstances necessarily counts as attending. Another example of a polymorphous activity concept is the concept working. One can work by running or talking or sitting, but equally one can do each of these things without working. To say
that someone is attending, according to White, gives us no more idea as to what specific activities she is engaged in than to say she is working.
To describe someone as attending, on this view, is to say that there is some
specific activity the person is engaged in that is focused on something that occupies
her (where that same activity in another context when not focused on the relevant
thing does not constitute attending to it). For example, one can attend to an argument by reading it but one can read an argument without attending to it. This is
compatible with holding that attending is a matter of focusing; for we may say that

14

what it is to focus on something is to engage in some specific activity that is focused

on the relevant thing.6
These remarks about attention are intended to be consonant with how we
ordinarily think of attention. But prima facie they do not fit very well with some
scientific discussions of attention. In particular, they seem not to capture what
scientists sometimes call diffuse or ambient attention (Pashler 1998). Just how
attention so conceived is to be understood is a topic to which I shall return later.
For the moment, I shall stick with attention understood in the typical ordinary, everyday way.
5. Attention and Seeing
Can you attend to a thing via the use of the eyes without seeing it? Given his
comments in the passage quoted earlier, it is clear that William James thought not.
For James, consciousness is part of the essence of attention. However, according to
Kentridge, Heywood and Weiskrantz (1999), blindsight subjects can attend to things
in the blind hemifield without being visually conscious of those things. They cite as
evidence the fact that their blindsight subject was more likely to guess correctly
whether a circle had been presented in a given location L in the blindfield if the location was cued beforehand by bars just above and below L (bars that were themselves entirely within the blind field). A plausible view is that the bars attracted the
blindsight subjects attention to the spatial region occupied immediately afterwards
by the circle and thereby to the circle. On this view, he did not see the circle but he
did attend to it. So, it is possible to attend to something in the visual case and yet
not see it.
One might respond that the bars really only drew the subjects attention to a
specific region of space within the blind field. But even if this is true, there is locational attention without locational consciousness and so attention does not require
consciousness, as James supposed. Moreover, in general when we attend to an occupied region of space, we cannot help but attend to the thing in that region of
space. Why suppose that this case is any different?
Further evidence that attention can occur without seeing is provided by
Jiang, Costello, Fang, Huang, and He (2006). They found that invisible pictures of
nudes (made invisible by a technique known as inter-ocular suppression) located on
one side of the visual field draw heterosexual subjects attention (as judged by their
performance on a later task for which the locus of attention is crucial) if the nudes
are of the opposite gender.7
6

Creature focus, thus, is to be understood in terms of activity focus.

Jesse Prinz (forthcoming) suggests that even though the subjects eyes saccade to
the nudes, the subjects do not attend to them. But if attention is not going to the
nudes at all, why do the subjects exhibit superior performance with respect to the
detection of the orientation of a Gabor patch flashed into the region of the nudes af7

15

What about the other way around? Can one see a thing without attending to
it? A famous experiment by Mack and Rock (1999) seems to provide evidence for
the view that one cannot see a thing without attending to it (and thus that there is a
refrigerator illusion). In this experiment, test subjects were given the demanding
task of determining whether the vertical arm or the horizontal arm of a cross is
longer. The cross was presented for a fifth of a second followed by a mask for half a
second. The purpose of the mask was to prevent any further processing of the visual display after the cross disappeared from the screen.

terwards (as opposed to the orientation of such a patch flashed elsewhere)? It is

true that the high contrast stimulus acts as an attention lure, but this does not preclude attention from going to the nudes. In general, when ones eyes go to a stimulus
S, even if one is focusing elsewhere, ones focus is drawn to S, if only for a few moments. Furthermore, the discovered attentional effect is very specific: when the
nudes are of the same gender as the subjects, attention is repelled (as shown by inferior performance with respect to Gabor patch orientation). The obvious conclusion is that emotion-laden stimuli modulate selective attention and do so even
when the stimuli are invisible. Prinz adds that if attention were going to the nudes,
we might expect to see increased activation in the ventral stream, where object representations are processed and, according to Prinz, fMRI studies of inter-ocular
suppression do not show increased ventral processing. Let us grant that the evidence shows that in general there is no increased ventral processing with respect to
suppressed stimuli and that this indicates that attention does not go to the suppressed stimulus. What is supposed to follow? In general, the eyes do not saccade
to the low contrast stimulus. In this case, they do; and for this case, fMRI studies
have not been done.
16

In the first three trials, the subjects were presented with the cross alone before the
mask. On the fourth trial a small black square was located very close to the cross.
Subjects were not expecting anything different about this trial and so they were not
looking for something new. Immediately after the trial they were asked whether
they saw anything on the screen before the mask appeared that had not been there
in the previous trials.
Roughly of the subjects did not report seeing the small, dark square even
though it was very close to their fixation point. All the members of a control group
who were not given the demanding attentional task reported seeing it. The condition of the test subjects was dubbed inattentional blindness by Mack and Rock.
They took it to show that attention is necessary for visual perception.
Now it certainly seems right to say that the test subjects who failed to report
seeing the black square did not attend to it. But it is also the case that they were not
able to attend to it, given that their attentional resources were exhausted elsewhere.
One possibility then is the Mack/Rock view: attention to a thing is necessary for
visual perception of that thing. On this view, there really is a refrigerator light illusion.
Another possibility not considered by Mack and Rock is that in some special
circumstances attention to a thing is necessary for visual perception of it. After all,
in their experiment, the visual stimulus is brief, unexpected, presented while the
subjects are attending elsewhere, and followed by a mask (Mole 2004). This possible explanation, however, does not accommodate easily the results of other experiments involving inattentional blindness in which the circumstances are not so obviously special.
A third possibility is that the ability to attend to a thing is necessary for visual
perception of that thing. On this view, one fails to see a thing if one cannot attend to
it. Still one can see a thing if one does not attend to it. This view is the one I favor. 8
One reason is that it accommodates nicely the results of Sperlings famous experiment (1960) in which subjects are presented very briefly with an array of 12 letters
(see below).

There is a fourth possible explanation worth mentioning, namely that subjects do

indeed see the stimulus but, given its brevity, they immediately forget it and thus fail
to report it (Chalmers 2008). This seems completely implausible, however. The
brevity of the stimulus cannot be the crucial factor since other experiments on inattentional blindness involve stimuli that are present for several seconds. Perhaps it
will be replied that the subjects fail to attend to the stimulus in the Mack and Rock
experiment, and that is why they forget it. But failing to attend to the bars on the
left of the central spot in figure 3 does not prevent consciousness of the bars and
memory of them afterwards. So why should it make a difference here?
8

17

Sperling found that subjects were only able to identify 3 or 4 of the letters if told
simply to identify as many as possible. However, if a tone was sounded immediately
after the array disappeared (high, medium or low indicating which row the letters in
which the subjects were to identify), the subjects managed to get all 4 right (typically). The obvious explanation is that the tone directed the subjects attention to a
particular row. Since the subjects did not know in advance which row would be the
relevant one and the subjects reported that they saw each letter even though they
could only identify the letters in the row corresponding to the tone, it seems very
plausible to hypothesize that there were letters the subjects saw to which they did
not attend.
Even though the subjects can only identify 3 or 4 of the letters in Sperlings
experiment, they can say accurately how many letters were present on the basis of
their experience. This is one difference between the letters in Sperlings array and
the bars on the right of the central spot (see figure 3). Each letter is seen but each
bar on the right of the spot is not. It is worth emphasizing that the claim that each
letter is seen does not entail that each letter identity is represented at a conscious
level. (One can see the letter A, for example without seeing it as an A or indeed
without being able to identify the various letter segments.) It could be that as attention is directed to the row corresponding to the tone, aspects of the letters in that
row that were only represented unconsciously prior to the tone become part of the
phenomenology. 9
Indeed, this is the most plausible view; for if a numeral or pseudo-letter is substituted for one of the letters in a Sperling array and subjects are attending to a row
containing only letters, they still take the array to be filled with letters. In this case,
the subjects see the numeral or pseudo-letter, but they are not conscious of the fact
that it is a numeral or pseudo-letter. For more on the effects of attention on phenomenology, see the next section.
9

18

Perhaps it will be objected that in some cases we see things too quickly for us
to able to attend to them. It has been found, for example, that when subjects attention is taken up with a very demanding task in the center of the field of view, they
can nonetheless discriminate between famous and non-famous faces flashed into
the periphery even for times as short as 60 msecs (Li et al, 2002).
This is too hasty. It is certainly true that the time of presentation of the peripheral stimulus is too short for voluntary top-down attention to lock onto the stimulus. Furthermore, if indeed all top-down attentional resources are devoted to the
task in the middle, evidently there is no top-down attention left to allocate to the periphery. Still, bottom-up attention remains available and there is evidence that bottom-up attention can be switched involuntarily to a sudden onset stimulus lasting
only 60 msecs (Connor et al, 2004).
In another experiment, Li, Iyet, Perona and Koch (2004) presented images of
scenes for as short a time period as 27 msecs. After each trial, subjects wrote down
everything they could freely recall. There were no forced alternative choices. It was
found that subjects could accurately recall the gist of each scene. Here, apparently,
they saw things in the scene even though they were unable to attend to them.
Again, however, there is no clear empirical reason to deny that bottom-up attention picks up on each thing on which the subjects report. After all, if subjects can
covertly switch attention involuntarily to a single 60 msec stimulus located away
from the fixation point, it does not seem far-fetched to suppose that where there are
several stimuli suddenly presented in the foveal region, they can catch the subjects
attention simultaneously in a single shorter glance. Furthermore, it is hard to see
how attention could fail to be operative here with respect to each reported item; for
correctly reporting on an items identity requires having noticed the item and, in so
doing, having correctly taken it to be a so-and-so. Intuitively, that necessitates that
the item catch ones attention.
In the next section, I want to flesh out further my preferred view of attention
and to connect it with some scientific claims about attention.
6. More on the nature of attention
One issue I have not taken up yet is whether attention is an activity with an
intentional content. Let me begin with some general remarks about intentional
states and activities.
From
(1) Macbeth hallucinated a dagger,
we may infer
(2) Macbeth hallucinated something.
But (1) does not entail
(3) There is (exists) some dagger Macbeth hallucinated.
19

If there really were some dagger Macbeth was hallucinating, he would not be hallucinating at all! Indeed, if there really were any thing Macbeth was hallucinating,
then he would not be hallucinating. So, the quantifier something or some object
cannot safely be exported in contexts such as (2).
Here is a further example. Ponce de Leon was searching for the fountain of
youth. So he was certainly searching for something. But it is not the case that there
is (or was) a fountain for which he was searching.
One view is that these points apply to the case of attention. Consider, for example, the Kanisza triangle.

Here one can attend to the triangle. But there is no such triangle.10 Still, one
is attending to something. Even though one is attending to something (a triangle),
there is no triangle to which one is attending. These features of attention mark it
out as an activity with an intentional content. Or do they?
This might be contested (Shelley Kagan did so in conversation). But ones experience of a triangle here integrally involves the experience of a contrast in brightness within the region of the triangle and outside it and, in reality, there is no such
change in contrast. One attends to a bright white triangle,but there is no bright
white triangle. (The particular example is of no great importance anyway, since one
can surely hallucinate something and attend to one part of what one hallucinates
rather than another. Furthermore even if one knows one is hallucinating a complex
scene, one can switch ones attention (focus) from one part of the scene to another,
even though there are, in reality, no scene parts to which one is attending.)
10

20

One potential problem for the intentionalist view of attention is that the context P attends to x is extensional at least to the extent that co-referential terms that
have referents are substitutable salva veritate in the x position. Thus
(4) Paul attends to the cat,
(5) The cat = Dorothys pet
entail
(6) Paul attends to Dorothys pet.
Similarly,
(7) John attends to the color of the ball
(8) Red = the color of the ball
entail
(9) John attends to the color red.
So, P attends to x is not like P fears x or P desires to meet x, for example. A lady
of the evening in nineteenth century London might have feared Jack the Ripper
without fearing the polite man who gave her flowers each day even though, as it
turned out, Jack the Ripper was that man. I can desire to meet Ernst Mach without
desiring to meet the shabby pedagogue at the end of the bus who unknown to me is
Ernst Mach. By contrast, necessarily, if I attend to a and a is the same as b, then I attend to b.
Why is there this difference? Well, the London woman, in fearing Jack the
Ripper without fearing the polite man who gave her flowers each day, was fearing a
certain individual conceived of in one way and not in another. By contrast, we may
suppose, attending to a thing does not require any particular way of conceiving of
that thing.
There are various ways in which this general proposal could be developed
further. Consider the visual case. The view I prefer is that the content of visual attention is either a Russellian singular proposition (if there is a thing that is the object of attention) or a proposition that is just like such a proposition except that it
has a gap in it where an object should go (if there is no thing at all to which one is
attending). This makes the content robustly nonconceptual: only wordly entities
figure in the content. Of course, if attending to a thing has a propositional content
then there should be correctness or truth-conditions associated with it. But does
this really make sense? What are the correctness or truth-conditions for focusing on
a particular thing, an apple, say?
In the visual case, I maintain, one attends to an item via ones visual experience being focused on it (at least where a visual experience is present).11 This
proposal respects the general claim made earlier that attending to a thing is a matAs noted earlier, it is not always true that experience is present along with attention. In some abnormal cases, the visual phenomenology is missing.
11

21

ter of engaging in some specific activity that is focused on the thing; for in the normal visual case, the relevant activity is visually experiencing. Now the proposal that
visual attention is nonconceptual and propositional goes naturally with the view
(held by many) that visual experience is nonconceptual and propositional (Tye 2009
and 2010).12
The activity of focusing upon a given thing comes about here via ones experience focusing on the thing. That involves the experience representing the thing at
a conscious level in more detail than it would were the experience focused elsewhere, with the result that one is in a better position to discriminate the thing and
its features. With a change in focus, then, in the normal visual case, there is a corresponding change in the content of ones experience.
This is nicely illustrated in the following example. The patches in figure 11
are known as contrast patches.

In the case of what might be called intellectual attention, I do not hold that the
activity of attending has a nonconceptual content. In this case, the relevant specific
activity is conceptual, namely thinking, and where there is a thing about which one
is thinking, attention to that thing requires no one way of conceptualizing it. Attention here requires that the activity of thinking not only be about the relevant content
but also be focused on it. The topic of intellectual attention deserves discussion in
its own right.
12

22

Begin by both fixating and focusing on one of the dots. The patch to the right of the
dot looks to have greater light/dark contrasts. Now switch your focus to the patch
to the left while continuing to fixate on the dot. With the new focus, the patch to the
left looks to have roughly the same light/dark contrasts as the patch to the right (or
at least to be much closer in such contrasts to it). According to a study by Carrasco
et al (2004), shifting attention increases apparent contrast by 3-6%. This is a
change in the content of experience.
Are there any possible cases in which there is a change in attention without a
change in the content of visual experience, assuming that visual experience is
present? I am not aware of any. All the cases adduced in the literature (Chalmers
2004, Nickel 2004, Speaks 2010, Wu forthcoming) seem to me to involve a subtle
change in the content of the experience (Tye forthcoming). Still if there are any such
cases, what remains to underwrite the claim that the experience is focused on one
item rather than another is the role the experience plays in improving speed and
accuracy of discrimination with respect to possible changes in the item. Where an
experience is focused on object O, the subject of the experience is in a better position
to discriminate possible changes in O than would be the case if the experience were
focused elsewhere. Normally, this is a direct reflection of the richer content of the
experience with respect to the object upon which it is focused, and a correlative
richer visual phenomenology, but perhaps conceivably there are cases in which the
experience has non-conscious properties that are partly responsible for the superior
discriminatory response.
I want now to return to the topic of diffuse attention. The term attention, as
it is sometimes used in psychology, is broader in its application than in ordinary
contexts. It encompasses both what is sometimes called focal attention and what
is called diffuse attention, where focal attention is just attention, as I have been
concerned with it centrally in this essay. The relationship of diffuse attention to attention, as understood thus far, is like that of background lighting to a spotlight.
Thus, if we normally visually attend to an item by undergoing an experience that is
focused on that item, then it is natural to think of diffuse attention to an item as occurring via experience of the item that is not focused on it. Given this usage, in the
case of Sperlings experiment, one does diffusely attend to each letter, given that one
sees each letter.
Still, why does diffuse attention count as attention? The answer, I suggest, is
that in diffuse attention, there is a selection process at work that selects particular
things and properties and makes them available for further processing, thereby improving the speed and accuracy of appropriate discriminatory responses with re-

23

spect to those items. In this way, diffuse attention is like focal attention. The difference is most notably in the selection class. In focal attention, where visual experience is present, the items upon which the activity of focal attention operates are
items that are experienced. In diffuse attention, in such cases, the relevant class
consists of pre-conscious visual stimuli. Visual consciousness selects from among
these stimuli with the result that not everything visually represented is visually experienced. There is, then, a usage of the term attention under which we really do
not see things unless we attend to them. Under this usage of attention, there is a
refrigerator light illusion after all, though this is a misleading way of putting things,
since in everyday life attention is not used so broadly. Thus, the ordinary man, in
supposing that there are things he sees to which he does not attend, is under no
such illusion.
From this perspective, the debate between those who hold that attention is
diffuse and graded and such that there is no consciousness outside or beyond it and
those who hold that attention is focused and discrete and such that there is consciousness without it is verbal. Different parameters are in play for the relevant selection process.
VII. The vehicles of conscious awareness
Philosophers and psychologists who take change blindness to be a purely
cognitive phenomenon as opposed to a failure to see any thing in the field of view
often implicitly endorse a clear, color photograph model for the vehicles of conscious awareness.13 On this view, in the case of the two crowds of balls, there is a
mental snapshot of each crowd. Each snapshot pictures each ball in the relevant
crowd. There is change blindness because an inaccurate comparison is made between the two snapshots.
A better model is provided by drawn pictures. Think about the case of an artist drawing a picture of a scene. The artist begins by fixating on some part of the
scene. Some things in the scene are left out of her picture altogether. Others are
very richly depicted. We might be a bit like such an artist as we see the things
around us.
It is worth noting that the drawn picture model of visual experiences allows
for the possibility that some things not in the scene are experienced. Artists sometimes embellish the scenes they draw, adding items that are not present. Upon occasion, we might do that too as we see the world around us (see here section 3).
The idea that seeing things is like drawing pictures is reminiscent of Stephen
Kosslyns view (1980, 1994) of mental image generation.14 Kosslyn argues that image generation is not like retrieving a clear photograph from memory. Rather it is
best taken to be a constructive process similar in certain ways to drawing a picture.
Likewise, I am suggesting for visual experiences. This, I hasten to add, should not be
13
14

See, e.g., Dretske 2010.

See also Block 1983, Tye 1991.
24

taken to suggest that, in my view, seeing is inherently conceptual. It is not. Concepts may play a causal role in influencing how we direct our attention and relatedly
how we experience things as being, but concepts are not exercised in (thing) seeing
itself. Just as an artist may draw a picture involving all sorts of irregular shapes and
determinate shades of color for which the artist has no general concepts, so we too
in seeing the world around us may lack the concepts needed to state the accuracy
conditions for the visual experiences embedded in such seeing.
VIII. Do we see all the things in the visual field large enough for us to see?
If all is used distributively, the right answer is no there are typically (often) things large enough to see that we fail to see. If all is used collectively, the
right answer is yes we do see all the (non-occluded) things in the field of view
large enough to see.
So, there is a sense in which both sides in the debate about what we see are
right. However, the heart of the debate is about whether we see each thing in plain
view and here I have been arguing those who advocate the representational failure
hypothesis for many of the cases of change blindness are on the winning side.15
Michael Tye
The University of Texas at Austin

Earlier versions of this essay (or parts of it) formed the basis for one of my Nelson
lectures at the University of Michigan in 2007, a symposium talk at the Tucson Consciousness Conference in 2008, a symposium talk at the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness in Berlin 2009, another symposium talk at the Pacific APA
in 2010, a talk at the European Graduate School in Lausanne 2009, and colloquium
talks at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign in 2007, at Neu-Phi in Boston, 2009 and at Yale in 2009. The essay was also discussed at a meeting of the NYU
Mind and Language seminar in Spring 2010 and I am indebted to Jesse Prinz and especially to Ned Block for their comments.
15

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