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Attention in bodily awareness

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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to develop and defend an Attentional View of bodily awareness, on which attention is necessary for bodily awareness. The original formulation of the Attentional View is due to Marcel Kinsbourne (1995 and 2002). First, I will show that the Attentional View of bodily awareness as formulated by Kinsbourne is superior to other accounts in the literature for characterizing the relationship between attention and bodily awareness. Kinsbourne’s account is the only account in the literature so far which can accommodate key neurological diseases such as personal neglect. Second, when I consider Kinsbourne’s view in more detail, I will argue that Kinsbourne’s Attentional View faces problems because it is too reductive. Kinsbourne deviates from the standard taxonomy on which there is a body schema and a body image. Instead he reduces the body image to the neural representation of the body in the somatosensory cortex, the body schema and attentional shifts. I will present two challenges to Kinsbourne’s view which demonstrate that Kinsbourne’s reduction of the body image is unsuccessful. Finally, I will present a revised version of the Attentional View that is both empirically adequate and philosophically satisfactory.

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Notes

  1. For similar observations about the seeming presence of the body in the absence of attention see James (1890, p. 242), O’Shaughnessy (1980, pp. 221–223), Gurwitsch (1985, p. 31), Leder (1990). It is a further question as to how detailed the awareness of the body is in the absence of attention. There does not seem to be agreement in the literature. While some hold the body is present in all its details (O’Shaughnessy 1980, p. 223) others hold that it is merely an elusive presence (Leder 1990).

  2. For similar observations about the experience one has when one is focally attending to the body see Merleau-Ponty (1945, pp. 33f., 115), Kinsbourne (1995, pp. 206–209) and O’Shaughnessy (1995, pp. 177–183).

  3. One way to think about subattentional awareness is in terms of Ned Block’s notion of phenomenal consciousness without access consciousness (Block 1995). I shall say more about this idea in Sect. 1.3.

  4. The disagreement between O’Shaughnessy (1980) and Gurwitsch seems mainly phenomenological (for discussion see de Vignemont 2004).

  5. In a paper Schwitzgebel (2007) approached this question empirically. Although Schwitzgebel observed that subjects generally leaned towards the view that visual and bodily awareness is unmediated by attention, he admits that the interpretation of the results isn’t certain and the Subattentional View is not a promising avenue. I want to thank an anonymous referee for directing my attention to this paper.

  6. Block’s claim about pure phenomenal awareness hinges on his interpretation of Sperling’s experiment (1960). However, Block’s interpretation is far from uncontroversial. For discussion of this point see Prinz (2010, (2011) and Wu (2014, chap. 6).

  7. There is a hermeneutical issue. Kinsbourne is at times inconsistent in his terminology. Given the standard definitions used in the literature, I take it that the most plausible interpretation of “implicit knowledge of the structure of one’s body” as Kinsbourne makes use of it, is to understand it as referring to the body schema.

  8. The alternative view is a triadic taxonomy (e.g. Schwoebel and Coslett 2005). The triadic taxonomy includes the body schema, but splits up the body image into a semantic body representation, i.e. body semantics, and a body structural description, i.e. a visuo-spatial body map (see de Vignemont 2010, p. 671). I shall discuss the triadic distinction in more detail in Sect. 3, where I consider whether it could help Kinsbourne to defend his account against objections.

  9. In fact, Kinsbourne could be read as either claiming that bodily awareness in creatures with a possible cognitive architecture (e.g. robots) does not require the body image, or as claiming that bodily awareness in actual creatures with a cognitive architecture like us does not require the body image. I take it that Kinsbourne’s main aim is to establish the latter claim rather than the former. I want to thank an anonymous referee for pressing me to clarify this point.

  10. Kinsbourne’s account seems to be juxtaposed between enactive accounts (for discussion see de Vignemont 2011) and classic accounts of bodily awareness. While proponents of enactivism hold that the body schema is sufficient to account for bodily awareness, Kinsbourne in addition takes into view the somatosensory homunculus which has been left out in the enactivists’ picture.

  11. Another interesting neurological case in the vicinity is ‘numbsense’ (Rossetti et al. 1995; Paillard 1999). In numbsense patients are able to tell whether they have been touched on their body without being able to localize the sensation on a body map. This indicates the lack of a body image. If you can argue that body schema and somatosensory homunculus are relatively intact, the case of numbsense could be used against Kinsbourne’s reductive view more generally. While numbsense constitutes an interesting case and raises general issues for Kinsbourne’s account, I use Anema’s double dissociation because it can directly show that the body image is required as a further element in the cognitive architecture.

  12. Unfortunately, no scans were available for JO to directly confirm this hypothesis (Anema et al. 2009, p. 662).

  13. The strategy outlined in this section exploits the idea of a triadic taxonomy of body representations (e.g. Schwoebel and Coslett 2005). The triadic taxonomy includes the body schema, but splits up the body image into a semantic body representation, i.e. body semantics, and a body structural description, i.e. a visuo-spatial body map (see de Vignemont 2010, p. 671).

  14. The term ‘body semantics’ is taken from Schwoebel and Coslett (2005). In making sense of the idea of ‘body semantics’ as a further body representation, I mainly draw on their work. More recently it has also been discussed by Longo et al. (2010, p. 662–664).

  15. One might wonder why one cannot make use of the body schema to provide the spatial information that is required to locate an object in egocentric and allocentric space. The problem with this proposal is that we know from experiments (e.g. Fourneret and Jeannerod 1998; Marcel 2003; Kammers et al. 2009) that the spatial information represented in the body schema is not or only to a very limited amount available to consciousness. Therefore, the body schema does not seem to constitute a plausible alternative. I shall say more about this point in Sect. 4.2.

  16. Given that exogenous shifts of attention do not depend on the subject having a sense of the spatial location that they want to attend to, one might argue that the spatial information that is required for endogenous shifts of attention to a body part could be provided by exogenous shifts of attention to that very location that happen prior to performing the endogenous shift. This would provide a possible explanation of how one could perform endogenous shifts of attention to the body, which avoids the problem of circularity. While I agree with this assessment, I think the suggestion is based on an implausible picture of how endogenous and exogenous attention function in concert. Normally, exogenous shifts of attention arise because of some salient cues that cause attention to shift exogenously. The question is: What generates the exogenous response in these cases when one wants to endogenously attend to the body? It can hardly be a salient cue. Then what is it? The problem is that I don’t see any plausible answer that could be given. Therefore, there is little motivation for holding that endogenous attentional shifts are grounded in exogenous shifts of attention. The need to address this point was pressed by an anonymous referee.

  17. There are other experiments that demonstrate the same point. Information used to compute bodily movements seems to be only accessible to a limited extent. See Fourneret and Jeannerod (1998) and Kammers et al. (2009).

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Acknowledgments

Earlier drafts of this paper were presented in London, Warwick, Budapest, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Tübingen. I am grateful to the audiences on all these occasions for discussion, and, in particular, to Thomas Crowther for a set of written comments. I would also like to thank Wolfram Hochstetter, Elizabeth Irvine, Alex Morgan, Krisztina Orbán, Ferdinand Pöhlmann, Katia Samoilova, Wayne Wu and two anonymous referees for their valuable feedback. Finally, I would like to thank Hong Yu Wong for his criticism, advice and constant support throughout the writing of this paper. I gratefully acknowledge funding from the Stiftung der Deutschen Wirtschaft for a doctoral research fellowship and from the Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience (DFG Excellence Cluster EXC 307) at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen.

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  1. Philosophy of Neuroscience Group, Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, University of Tübingen, Otfried-Müller-Str. 25, 72076, Tübingen, Germany

    Gregor Hochstetter

  2. Department of Philosophy, University of Tüebingen, Bursagasse 1, 72070, Tübingen, Germany

    Gregor Hochstetter

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Hochstetter, G. Attention in bodily awareness. Synthese 193, 3819–3842 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1141-x

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