Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Your Brain Sees Things That You Don't
1. Is attention and awareness the same thing?
No. Recent studies show that a person’s attention can focus on something without actually being aware of it. A recent study conducted showed that an eight-year-old boy who is blind in an area of his right visual field could still point a dot flashed to his right field of vision even without being aware of its location. He insisted that he does not see a dot but when asked to point to the dot, he accurately gets it most of the time. This phenomenon is called blindsight discovered by 1970’s British researchers Larry Weiskrantz, Nicole Humphrey, and others. This happens when there is a damaged part in the primary visual cortex that dismisses consciousness of what one sees.
2. Do people with no brain damage experience this phenomenon?
Yes. Another study showed that people with no brain damage still attends to small things when flashed even without actually being aware of seeing the distraction.
A right dot flashed in the right of the screen where subjects are looking at. When a number flashes, they are asked to say the number as quickly as possible. When the number flashed on the right after the dot flashed, the subjects were able to quickly tell the number. However, when the number flashed on the left after the dot flashed on the right, the response time was slower because their attention needed to adjust. Therefore, the dot snags attention even if the subjects were not aware of the dot that appeared.
3. What is the attention schema theory and how does it explain the difference between attention and awareness?
The theory is an attempt to explain the relationship between awareness and attention. Attention only handles the data presented. It is only the way of how the brain focus on an object. Meanwhile, awareness it the interpretation of what one is attending to. It is the general description of the brain of what the brain attends.
Another explanation would be attention is a process that does not change while awareness is a process where one monitors what is being attended. These two processes most of the time come in pair that is why if awareness is removed, attention would start to lose its accuracy.
Reference:
Graziano M. (2016). Your Brain Sees Things That You Don’t. Retrieved from: http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/awareness-and-attention/476943/