4 - Attention, Perception, and Knowledge

Summary

Many think of the difference between sensation and perception in terms of information – perception carries information, but sensations, the raw feels that occur prior to perception, do not. A standard, biological account of information holds that it occurs only for information consumers. How is it that sensations become informational, and to whom do they become informational? In this chapter I argue that perception comes about due to attention directed by a subject. Attention is the process by which sensations are organized according to the subject’s interests, allowing them to have meaning for the subject, or to become informational for the subject. I compare this account to those that find attention to be necessary for the binding of features into objects, the creation of an objective spatial framework, or perceptual knowledge. I reject the first two accounts, ultimately arguing for a similar conclusion to those in the third, such as Campbell and Dickie. Experiential support for my account is the universal foreground/background structure of conscious perception, a structure that I argue depends on attention. Along the way I discuss at length the work of Treisman and Merleau-Ponty.