Consciousness and the Social Brain

construct just such a model of attention. The machinery exists. The capability is there. It has been studied in the context of social thinking. Humans have the ability to construct a model of someone else’s attentional state. 1 – 5
    Imagine that you are observing Bill. You see him look here and there. You see his facial expression and body language. You hear what he has to say. Obviously you can infer something about his attentional state. You can probably guess what he is attending to and even what he may attend to next. I am on safe ground with those assertions. But what kind of mental model have you constructed? When you reconstruct the state of his attention, where does that mental model stand on the scale from the perceptual to the cognitive? Does Bill’s awareness have a quality of physical reality to you, a thing that exists inside Bill, or does it seem more like your own clever deduction, an abstract proposition in your own head? Is it better described as social perception or social cognition?
    For many scientists, there is little difference between social perception and social cognition. The brain constructs many different models of other people’s minds, and the models exist at different levels of abstraction. The border between perception and cognition is poorly defined, and the term
social cognition
is at any rate much more commonin the literature. I acknowledge that I may be making too much of the distinction. But to me, perception and cognition have different shades of meaning and I find them useful in different situations.
    One way to get at the distinction between perception and cognition is through illusions. Figure 7.1 shows an example of the well-known Muller-Lyer illusion. Here the two horizontal lines are actually the same length—measure them and see for yourself—but the upper one looks much longer. Cognitively, you know that Line A is the same length as Line B. Perceptually, you cannot help seeing unequal lengths. In this illusion, perception and cognition are rather starkly dissociable.
    Can the same dissociation be demonstrated in the social realm? Is it possible to perceive awareness to be present in a source that, cognitively, you know is incapable of it?
    Ventriloquism is a good example of this distinction between social perception and social cognition. The most obvious component of ventriloquism is a simple auditory–visual illusion in which the sound of the voice seems to come from the puppet’s moving lips. But this so-called visual-capture illusion is mere surface and distracts from the deeper illusion of ventriloquism. When you see a good ventriloquist pick up a puppet and the puppet looks around, reacts, and talks, you experience an illusion of an intelligent mind that is directing its awareness here and there. Ventriloquism is a social illusion.

    FIGURE 7.1
Which horizontal line is longer? They are the same length in the well-known Muller-Lyer illusion.

    As a member of the audience you know cognitively, intellectually, that the puppet has no independent mind, but you fall for the illusion anyway. You have an impression of awareness emanating from the puppet. This phenomenon suggests that your brain constructs a perception-like model of the puppet’s attentional state. The model provides you with the information that awareness is present and has a source inside the puppet. The model is automatic, meaning that you cannot choose to block it from occurring. If you watch the puppet show, you will get the impression. With a good ventriloquist who knows how to move the puppet in realistic ways, to direct its gaze with good timing, to make it react to its environment in a plausible way—with the right cues that tickle your system in the right way—the effect pops out. The puppet seems to come alive and seems to be aware of its world.
    Puppetry therefore nicely illustrates three points. First, we construct models of other minds. Second, along with many other aspects of mind, we attribute the property of awareness to other people. Third, that model of awareness that we construct and attribute to somebody else is more perceptual in nature than cognitive. When interacting with another person, we have an impression of an awareness physically originating in that person.
Perceiving Awareness in Someone Else and in Oneself

    Figure 7.2 illustrates the proposed relationship between awareness and attention. I’ll explain the relationship first in the context of a person (Abel)