Evaluate The Relationship Between Attention And Consciousness

The relationship between attention and consciousness has been thoroughly researched, some researchers believe that there is a relationship between attention and consciousness, and that they might both be necessary for each to occur, and others believe that these are distinct entities. Importantly, when talking about attention, most researchers explain that they are talking about selective attention in their examples. Attention is described as the mechanism we use to actively processes specific information. Some researchers believe that attention is responsible for filtering the information we perceive, focusing on the most important information, allowing this information to be processed further in our brains. This leads to some researchers
Rensink et al., (1998) showed in research that observers commonly fail to notice changes to scenes or objects in different views, especially if these objects or scenes are not at the fixation point of their attention. This suggests that without attention being focused at those particular points, the observer fails to become conscious of these changes, unaware of what is happening. This is supported by Mack & Rock (1998), who found that the diversion of attention to another object or task results in participants failing to notice and unexpected object, interestingly, they found this to be true when this happens at the centre of interest, this is referred to as inattentional blindness. Together, these theories provide evidence that leads us to believe, attention is required to consciously perceive. However, Levins & Simons (1997) suggest that even though attention is necessary to perceive in change detection, it is not sufficient, they found that observers often miss changes to objects that they are focused on, suggesting that maybe consciousness and attention might be distinct. Mack & Rock (1998) found that subjects who noticed an unusual event within a scene became more likely to notice other unusual events. Together, these theories suggest that in certain situations some individuals may be more perceptive than others, this could be a result of the relationship between attention, consciousness and working memory. In support of this, Wolfe (1999) suggests that an unexpected event can be consciously perceived, but immediately forgotten. Resulting in failing to report perceiving the object. Wolfe (1999) continues, that this may be a failure of memory rather than perception. However, it was also suggested that in this situation, forgetting an object must occur so fast that it would be indistinct from perception, suggesting that this theory might need further research to support it.