Tony Lambert

Research Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

Visual Attention and Conscious Awareness

Current understanding of the inter-relationships between peripheral visual processing, visual awareness, and visual attention is relatively poor. This talk describes a programme of research which has attempted to clarify the way in which movements of attention may be influenced by conscious and non-conscious processing of information in peripheral vision. In a number of experiments it has been found that movements of attention towards an object of interest can be influenced by non-conscious processing of peripherally presented "cue" information. The latter may involve encoding attributes of the cue object, that range from simple visual features to complex semantic attributes. Implications of these findings, and their relation with the views of William James concerning attention, which were published more than a century ago, will be discussed.

This page was last updated on 16 Feb 2001.

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