Transcript for:
Graziano's Attention Schema Theory Overview

hi this is matt mccormick i'm in the department of philosophy at the the california state university of sacramento uh this is for my philosophy of mind course phil 153 it's the second of two lectures we've done on michael graziano's attention schema theory of awareness so let's dive in uh so we've got a tiered account of consciousness that we've built up over the course of several weeks that's culminating here with graziano giving us an account of what awareness is an awareness is on graciano's account a sort of second order second level meta representation where you're putting yourself into uh the representation and you're understanding attention itself so it's a sort of peculiar difficult uh theory to get your head around so let's just review what we've learned so far attention uh when it occurs in animals is when there is uh some stimulus in the environment that uh captures their attention that they direct their attention to and what happens is that they direct or allocate additional cognitive resources to it so when you look more closely at the object um in the you know in the periphery of your vision you're directing your eyes directing your mind power looking over there or say you're looking for your keys okay so you're focusing your attention on this task you're keeping yourself on task you're going around the room looking for this particular thing for this goal directed activity that your nervous system is engaged in you're trying to find your keys so you're focused on that to the exclusion of all these other things no don't distract me i've got to find my keys before i can do this next thing so attention whether it's top-down directed like that or whether it's bottom-up captured you hear a loud noise and you startle and you look over there at it so you're looking at it and you're now wanting to know what that is well the other things that go on your environment are not sort of in your awareness or in your attention you're not thinking about those you're thinking about the loud noise so attention in these terms is selective signal enhancement there's lots of signals in your environment um you're selecting some out to be enhanced and what you're doing is focusing scarce cognitive resources on more survival salient events in the environment so uh this evolved for obvious reasons that when um when when uh creatures in uh in evolutionary environments are uh trying to find food trying to find prey trying to evade being eaten by predators um obviously some details in their environments are more important than others and they've got to focus their attention on those food matters survival matters taking care of your offspring matters so selective signal enhancement evolved as an adaptive trait that improves uh creatures ability to handle those sorts of tasks awareness then according to graziano and he's got a lot of neuroscience research from his lab in princeton to back this up is the brain's internal model of the process of attention that represents attention in ourselves and others so awareness is attending to attention or it's modeling attention itself it's a second order uh meta representation of attention so modeling ourselves and other creatures with attention knowing my thoughts and their thoughts directing my behavior and predicting theirs is highly adaptive so it's not just useful to me to be able to direct my attention at objects in my environment but there's some objects in my environment that themselves have attention so some creatures and their behavior matters greatly to me so if they are sorry there are some creatures in my environment that also have attention and their behavior matters greatly to me if they're of my own species i don't know what they're doing if they're another species if they're a predator species i want to know what they're doing and i want to know what they're thinking about i want to know what they care about i want to know where their attention is directed currently are they looking at me are they going to eat me is it possible for me to eat them is that something that i can catch um or or have some other you know sort of important evolutionary connection to so being able to to first off parse objects or creatures in my environment that have attention don't have it and being able to understand or model what that attention is so if i see another hominid or another primate who's attending to some object well that might matter to me they might be attending to some something that's food um they might be paying attention to me they might be paying attention to something else that's dangerous in the environment and i want to know what they're thinking about um that matters to my survival too so this second order capacity to model attention comes on the evolutionary scene and enables this sort of expanded capacity to keep track of what's going on in my environment not just objects that themselves don't have attention but now with awareness i can separate out the objects that have attention the ones that don't because the ones that have attention really matter to me and then i can model and keep track of what they're doing what they're thinking about um and so on and part of graziano's point here is that the same mechanism that i'm using to model their attention i'm using the model my own uh in fact he thinks it evolved to sort of direct my own attention first so awareness evolved first as a means for me to monitor or keep track of my own attention and because if i know what my attention's on i know what it's not on and i'm able to pursue goal-directed activities i can find my keys i can say to myself and set a goal i need to find my keys so i'm going to keep looking until i find them so i'm directing my attention well i can't do that if i don't know what my attention is if i can't have the second order uh representation of what my attention is doing you know uh there's lots of cases where you attend without awareness that is uh you're not sort of reflecting on the secondary level but your attention is being drawn to this thing then to that thing you're driving um you're sort of blind driving you're not thinking about it but your cognitive resources are being dedicated to things like keeping track of the stop lights keeping track of the other cars around you so you're um attending but you're not sort of fully second order modeling or thinking about and being self-aware about where your attention is going um but if i can use my awareness to uh focus and direct and sort of model okay what is it that i'm looking at now what am i thinking at about now does that fit in with my purposes my goals is that part of my long-term planning is that what i'm imagining and so on so awareness has this expanded evolutionary function both in my modeling my own behavior and keeping track of what my attention is doing and keeping track of the attention of others so awareness then is attending to attention or it's a second order modeling the internal report then that we get back from this uh turn so when the when awareness takes hold of and models or represents what my attention does it it renders something for me it gives me uh it fills the screen for me if you will it it makes the world look a certain way that's the content of the report that awareness is given me when it directs itself to my attention so graziano's got a number of claims here one of them is that awareness is an attention schema so it's a sort of a template that i use to separate attending creatures from non-attending creatures myself included and i apply it to myself and to others and furthermore he's curious about and wants to explain what the nature of that report or nature of the content that results from that cognitive actives and he's got some really interesting things to say about the nature of it ones that get at some really old um difficult philosophical problems so graziano argues then that the internal report that you get from this second order uh attend at the second order awareness is rendered as feels it it feels like like uh pain or pleasure or you note that you're feeling something something when you look at your attention and it's mysterious in origin it's a simplified it's cartoon like just like your awareness of your body i get this signals i get this model i know where my hands are i know what they're doing i'm aware of their position in space but i don't know anything from my side about what the actual muscle fibers are doing about about the chemistry of the connection points in my bones or my uh muscles you know there's there's hundreds of muscles that uh engage some of that 400 different little muscle structures that engage in our faces and when we smile um we just know that we're smiling you just have a feeling you just have that or you just know that somebody else is feeling but you don't know what's going on inside there to make that happen okay so the report is a kind of pricy um that is it's shortened it's truncated it's it's um but it's more than that i actually think the crosstalk should go further here it's not just that it's simplified it's not just that i'm getting um uh a few or or only some or some percentage of the information about the muscles uh the the very character of the report itself is fundamentally unlike the thing that is being represented like my experience of my face smiling or my experience of your face smiling or my experience of these things is rendered as feels not as uh as the facts about the chemistry involved in the in in the event or the photons that are streaming across the room that that be that uh indicate the the information um i'm getting no access to the real world as it were a mind independent world the world's being rendered into um something minds can ponder and those are fields those are subjective phenomenal qualitative feels so he's hinting at a really surprising answer to this allegedly intractable you know if you go back to chalmers and the hard so-called heart problem this allegedly intractable philosophical problem there's no explaining why it is things feel the way they feel well here's graziano giving us an evolutionary neuroscientific account about about why they feel the way they feel so it feels mysterious in origin it feels magical with the physical mechanisms that produce it hidden from my view i know you're conscious by looking at you and seeing you look you're you know move your eyes around or looking at something or focusing on a book while you read it and um i have ideas about your thoughts instantly i know when you're looking at something i can i sort of divine that you're thinking about some something you know you you um you hold up a uh a magazine and focus on the headline okay so i just understand that that thing is in your consciousness it's in your awareness and i just have that sort of instant awareness of it unavoidably and mysteriously grazie o'neill's fond of talking about ventriloquism puppets here because he he notes rightly that when you see a ventriloquist and when they put their hand inside the puppet and then they make the puppet start to behave or start to look around or talk or what have you it instantly takes on a cognitive personhood life of itself that you can't not see you can't not see that as a being with a mind that's what makes those those acts funny or interesting or entertaining is to see these two characters these two persons interact on the stage talk to each other and see the puppet turns attention to other things and that's part of this attention schema that forces its way it's a sort of set of goggles that you see the world through so that when you see certain kinds of objects you see them as things with minds and we'll get more to that so awareness um in you seems like a sort of immaterial ghost to me and graziano's got some really good uh discussions and even videos or ted talk of him talking about ventriloquism and how it's like the life comes into the thing and then the life vanishes from it when the ventriloquist stops um operating the puppet okay so what we're talking about then is uh his theory of mind not in the philosophical sense of us building the theory of mind but in the sort of more classic evolutionary psychology sense a theory of mind is that some creatures have theory mind some might some creatures don't you have it tumbleweeds don't to represent an entity is possessing attention is to model it as having an internal subjective private experience like i do uh versus not like hydras and tumbleweeds when i look at a tumbleweed i don't see it as having some internal experience or some mind or some attention or some sort of magical feel about it but when you look at that picture for instance of that chimp it's unavoidable you you see where its eyes are pointed and you know that that chimp is thinking about what's on the end of that weed you know she's um gotten that weed she stripped it off you watch these watch the chimps do this in the sacramento zoo she's taken this weed stripped it off um gotten it wet and dipped it into the ant hive and pulled it out with the ants on it so she can eat the ants so there's a purposeful um very deliberate activity there and you can't not see it as a creature with a mind a creature with intentions with purposes with goals with ideas like she's focusing her attention on that project and not on other things likewise with the tiger um that chimp has a has a mind and she's focusing her attention on fishing ants out of the ant hill right now our capacity to do that to recognize that to represent not just the external properties of objects such as color but objects as possessing attention is made possible by an attention schema that's the second order template that we use to recognize objects with attention in the world and that's what he calls awareness so i promised this in the first week of the course that we would we would disambiguate or or separate out some of these important conch concepts related to mind like consciousness like sentience like attention now we understand what attention is perception and now we've got a very modern very well argued theory about what awareness is awareness is your capacity to model another creature's attention that champ has black hair she has a stick in her hand and she is focusing intently on her task uh whereas creatures who don't have an attention schema can't recognize that about these other objects you instantly and effortlessly know that you're being looked at by the tiger you know that the tiger's thinking about you in a picture like that he's got you know his eyes on you and you are in his mind and that's this internal metaphor that there's sort of no escaping it makes it feel magical and graziana says this is why we're all sort of naturally dualists is that um that the the nature of that um that possession that that model the attention schema uh gives us this notion that some things are in mind and other things are not so there's possession taking mental possession of something is to have it be in a mind but of course minds don't have a physical place i mean we sort of think of the brain and the body as being where they are but the mind is this other immaterial sort of mysterious place where ideas live and where its attention is focused so it's a it's a kind of um it's not it's not a physically observable thing that way okay so it turns out then that apes also have theory of mind so that was us in the previous slide applying our theory of mind to that chimp but there's been some really remarkable research and i'll show you some here where they're testing to see to whether and to what extent do chimpanzees themselves have theory mind so how much can they do that okay so watch this video and what's going to happen in this video is that you've got this um uh keeper we'll call the human in the backyard the keeper and the keeper is going to come back and forth um and they're going to have this relationship so what's happening is that they're up in the upper left-hand corner there's a chimp who's watching this video and the video is this exchange or this interaction between the keeper and the chimp uh sorry i'll call that the uh the ape so that's a human in an ape suit in the video so the chimp is watching the keeper and the ape and there's going to be these complicated interactions between them that are designed to expose or reveal whether or not the chimp has a theory of mind and the way they're going to do this is they're going to use a they've got an infrared camera that's that's being used to track the chimpanzees eye movements so the chimp that's watching this video that you're watching the system is tracking its eye movements to see where that chimp is looking and where she's looking is going to tell us about what she's thinking about or what expectations she has or what she is anticipating to happen and some really interesting things happen here so let me point out a few as we go through okay so this is a false belief test for hatsuka that's her name the chimp up in the corner so the keeper looks in both huts the ape comes in and strikes the keeper keeper comes back with a stick and goes after the egg and hatsuka anticipated and looked at that hut so now the keeper looked and saw the ape go into that hut and the keeper strikes that hut now watch what happens okay so partly what's important here is that in the first two cases the keeper um the the ape attacks the keeper and the ape runs inside a hut in view of the keeper's eyes the keeper has got his face pointed at the ape and he can see the uh ape go into the hut hatsuka is watching all of that and keeping track of who attacked who who's coming after who and hatsuko knows where the ap is and knows where the keeper is and knows what the keeper knows so hetsuka looks and you can see the red dot is her anticipating that the keeper's going to come back and go after um the hut that has that houses the ape that the keeper saw the ape go into but something really interesting happens right here so right here inside of the keeper the ape changes now the keeper's gone [Music] now the ape runs away so now where's the ape [Music] okay so what these researchers think they've just discovered is that even though hatsuka saw the ape run away hatsuka still anticipates and expects the keeper to come out and attack the hut in which the keeper thinks the ape is hiding that is hatsuki's keeping track of what the keeper knows and what the keeper doesn't know the keeper doesn't know that the ape left and hatsuko realizes well the keeper thinks that the ape is in the hut so that's a false belief test hatsuko knows the keeper has a false belief hatsuka keeps looking at and anticipating that the keeper will go back to that hut where the keeper last saw the ape even though hatsuka knows that the ape is not in there right so here's another one watch again same sort of procedure unfolds this is natsuki keeper looks goes away here comes the ape attacks provokes the revenge ape hides in the hut in full view of the keeper natsuki anticipates and looks to that hut okay again ape hides in full view of the keeper natsuki anticipates that the keeper will go after the hut that's got the ape in it so now watch different ape goes into one hut keeper thinks vapes in that hut ape changes huts ape runs away what does the keeper think the keeper doesn't know what i know the keeper thinks that the ape is in the right hand hut okay so there's a lot of details here and you're just getting the tiny little two minute video but the idea is and this has sort of been robustly confirmed with other sorts of experiments the idea is that at some rudimentary level at least the the the chimpanzee that's watching this whole thing unfold is keeping track of what the keeper knows and what the keeper doesn't know and anticipating that the keeper will act on the basis of their information which is false the ape has left but only i know that the keeper doesn't know that the key so the keeper is going to go after that hut where the keeper last saw the ape so the conclusion then is great apes anticipate that other individuals will act according to false beliefs okay that's a pretty sophisticated theory of mind and that's keeping track of attention because the chimpanzee is doing that by looking to see where the keeper is looking paying attention sorry the um the chimp that's watching is looking to see where the keeper's face is directed and where their eyes are pointed and that's a a heuristic for understanding where their attention is the ape that sorry the chimpanzee that's watching knows um where the keeper what's what's in the attention keeper's attention and what's not what's in their mind and what's not in their mind all right so really cleverly constructed experiments like that there's a whole bunch of others um sort of help us see and seem to corroborate this evolutionary account of um sorry there's another one i thought i turned it off all right it's off now so these sorts of experiments seem to corroborate this evolutionary account of by showing this continuum of development from great apes to humans of which we're cousins to show this continuum of this layered on capacity to keep track of what you know what you don't know i know that you know that you don't know this and don't know that that's what makes for good episodes of games of throne games of thrones is us understanding all these complicated relationships about who knows what and who doesn't know what and what kind of intrigue is going on between the characters right so that's all built out of theory of mind and that all sort of unfolds from awareness in graziano's sense okay so um another sort of past to kind of kind of get our head around getting head around this whole thing i apologize i don't apologize there's justin bieber we have lots of perceptions coming into our cognitive systems some of those perceptions catch my attention that is bottom-up capture or i direct my attention at them boosting the details of my representation of it that's your attention that's what happens when you focus increased cognitive uh resources at some stimulus and i can and i can direct my attention to the fact that i or you have the capacity for attention itself i can take note of my own or your ability to attend i'm attributing awareness to myself or to you i am modeling attention in this object i do that with this attention schema or the second order level of awareness i realized that while my wallet got stolen my attention was on the scenic overlook or you know you know that that bieber's thinking about himself or he's aware of you thinking about himself at the moment all right so awareness is our representation of attention representations when they're models are simplified inaccurate reduced in detail and specificity look there's too much information in your environment even at the attention level for you to be able to process all of it it's always about a computational load and you've got to make fast decisions with uh that function well enough for you to get by you don't have to know everything about everything you just need to know enough to sort of survive so we get these rendered down accounts but again i think it's not just that it's simplified or merely this inaccurate is that it's fundamentally different i mean the world this is weird we know this all the way back from john locke the world doesn't have blue objects in it it's just blue is one of the manifestations of this internal mind relationship i have when certain kinds of electromagnetic radiation certain wavelengths of the em radiation strike my eyeballs then i have the subjective sensation of blue but blue doesn't live out there nor does anything else we just get this rendered down um representation of a world that's good enough for us to get by and function attention has evolutionary advantage we've argued in selectively allowing more cognitive resources to be devoted to events and objects that are more important modeling attention itself as awareness has evolutionary advantages in social animals um that's what this woman's doing right she's hamming it up for the camera because she knows what you know and she knows that they don't know it and that that's what makes it funny that her friends don't know she's doing that and um she's doing that for you the audience is watching the whole thing modeling attention and others lets me know what they know and what they don't know what they're thinking about what i'm thinking about um and enables this sort of you know profound next meta layer of complexity to the way that we can keep track of objects in our world what kind of objects they are okay so graziano says in this extension of the attention schema theory awareness first evolved to help control one's own attention and then gradually expanded into another use that has ended up defining us humans socially and culturally he gave us our concept of mind and allowed us to live immersed in a society of the minds of other people okay so this theory says graziano being a good scientist um produces some predictions um so he wants to test it so i'll give you a little bit of the research here that tests it that seems to be consistent with what we've been arguing a little bit the argument in favor of the conclusions so in bottom-up cases of attention capture zombie agents discriminate some stimuli and then force the boost in signal enhancement so you're not able to uh prevent your uh mind getting taken over by you know the bug that flies into your eye just grabs your attention and forces you to act um or the loud noise that makes you jump you can't stop that okay so those are zombie agents that's not you sort of directing those consciously and they just they just capture your attention so employing awareness as an attention schema that is from the top down might assist top-down control or direction of signal enhancement okay so that's the hypothesis so the prediction then that graziano makes whether some of the researchers do in the research is that without awareness attention should still be possible but it should suffer a deficit in control so his idea is that awareness is for controlling attention it's for keeping track of what am i looking at right now is it the thing i should be looking at or is there something else i should be looking at in task b and task behaviors okay so here's an experiment subjects are instructed to fixate on a central location on a screen and the cue is briefly presented on one side or the other i can't really animate it but imagine a yellow dot is flashed on the right or it's a yellow dot is flashed on the left if the and here's the instruction that the subjects get if you see a queue on the right hand side of your screen then we want you to look for the target we're going to flash something else at you like a dollar sign or something we want we want you to look for your target on the on the left-hand side on the opposite side if the queue is on the left then you should look for your target on the right okay so you've got this instruction that takes some executive control it takes you resisting some of this bottom-up capture so you've been told okay if it flashes on the right i need to look left okay that's a that's a a pretty sophistic pretty complicated level of of modeling your own attention and then guiding it or directing it to some other region of space the queue then draws automatic bottom-up attention to itself like that flashing yellow dot you can't not see it and you can't not have it sort of grab some of your cognitive resources when it flashes on the screen so when subjects are aware of the cue that is take subjects and assume what they did was that they had some subjects they told you they told them we're going to flash a yellow dot on the right hand side of the screen or the left-hand side of the screen then we want you to do this okay now if they had that instruction ahead of time they were better able to control this initial contrary attentional effect so what's happening is that that yellow dot flashing over on the right is pulling you to the right but you need to look to the left at the awareness level so it does it but the yellow dot pulls you over there but then you're directing because you knew it was coming you're able to still keep on task and look for the object on the left and i didn't look up this particular study but probably what they were doing is measuring reaction time or something like that and then what happens as a result is they were able to pull attention away from the queue and direct it to the opposite side where the target was most likely to appear the ones who knew in contrast when participants were unaware of the queue when they hadn't been warned um and they weren't uh you know anticipating it the bottom-up pre-potent effect dominated biasing attention to the side that the queue appeared ultimately to the detriment of tax task performance on these trials so with the people that they didn't tell them that that you should look to the left or look to the right when the cue happens they didn't do as well they they suffered on the scores on the test because they they weren't guiding they weren't modeling or sort of actively uh keeping track of where their attention was so they weren't engaging the awareness okay another experiment subjects performed a centrally presented letter discrimination task so imagine i'm going to put a i'm assuming something like this we're going to put a t in the middle of the screen while a distracting dot motion stimulus was presented in the periphery okay so you're looking at the t and the red dots bouncing around on the edges performance on the letter task was actually better when the subjects were aware of the distracting motion i assume they took some people and just said we want you to focus on the thing in the middle and if you didn't tell them anything about the red dot and then when you start flashing the red dot on them they their performance goes down but if you tell some people and have them anticipate in it and they know it's coming um their performance uh improves uh when the distracting motion was was sub threshold and subjects were unaware of it right so the same result comes out of this case in other words when participants were aware of the distracting motion they were capable of controlling their attention keeping it from the distracting stimulus and on the task okay so this is some of the evidence that graziano thinks helps support this account of of the function of awareness as defined awareness is an attention schema and it lets us guide or direct or steer where attention goes um because you're modeling your own attention in your independent other people and some of the you know the chimp the ape research or the temp research also shows us about the presence of both attention and awareness in these other creatures so we're getting lots of interesting empirical research that seems to support elements of the theory okay both studies show perhaps counterintuitively that more that the more noticeable noisy stimuli have less of a negative impact on the assigned task but when you are engaging your awareness awareness is the key modeling our own attention by representing the self as trying to complete an attention task boost performance because you're doing this thing stay focused move my attention over there because i just got this distracting thing don't be distracted by the red dot don't be distracted by the yellow dot stay focused on you know the task at hand so that's you steering with your attention because you know what your attention is doing i model my attention keep it focused suppressing distraction and performance improves for those people so that's what it's for okay so here's what we've seen big picture at the end of both these lectures the brain computes a simplified model of the process and current state of its own attention and the content of this model is the basis of subjective reports i'm aware of x that is i am aware of x so now we've got this more uh technical notion of awareness what does that require requires all of these elements stimulus x needs to be encoded as a representation needs to be something that's in my cognitive system competing with other stimulus representations for limited brain resources so i've got to attend to it um i need to well first we need to perceive it and if stimulus x wins this signal competition because there's all this other cognitive work going on resulting in being deeply processed in the brain then stimulus x is attended you know i can focus and now say well i i'm looking at the vertical edge on my uh computer monitor right now so that uh that idea just won this competition for all the things that are in my in my peripheral vision or in my field of vision right now that's the one that i just talked about i pointed at um and that got more attention to report subjective awareness of stimulus which is what i did i said i am thinking about the vertical edge on my monitor the brain has to compute a model of the process of attention itself i'm reporting about what i'm attending to so i've got to do that second level modeling the complex phenomena of a stimulus being selectively processed by the brain attention is represented in a simplified model an attention schema says graziano this model leaves out many all of the mechanistic details of the actual phenomena of attention um instead it depicts a mysterious physically impossible property awareness all right so some of the sort of most intriguing aspects of the philosophical problem about what is the nature of the content of consciousness that's called heart problem is uh getting uh exposed and revealed here by the nature of this cognitive system that thinks about itself part of the problem here is that you've got a system trying to understand itself and that creates this gap in the reports and the way it's going to render itself to itself that becomes this kind of special phenomenal qualitative set of properties that are not like other things because of because they're the output of this awareness system that's modeling attention all right so that's graziano's attention schema theory of awareness