Consciousness and the Social Brain

perceiving somebody else’s (Bill’s) attention. Then I’ll generalize the explanation to include the perception of one’s own attention.
    In this figure, Abel looks at Bill and Bill looks at a coffee cup. First consider Bill, whose visual attention is focused on the cup. Neuroscience is now able to provide a fairly detailed account of visual attention. One stimulus representation in the brain wins aneuronal competition among other representations. Bill’s visual system builds a representation of the coffee cup, and that representation wins the attentional competition.

    FIGURE 7.2
Awareness as a model of attention. Bill’s visual attention is directed at the cup. Abel, observing Bill, constructs a model of Bill’s mental state. Part of that model is the construct that Bill is aware of the cup. In this formulation, awareness is a construct that represents the attentional state of a brain.

    Now consider Abel, whose machinery for social perception constructs a model of Bill’s mind. This type of model-building is called “theory of mind.” 6 Able constructs a theory of Bill’s mind. This model probably includes many attributes, such as Bill’s possible thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and desires. Abel may have a rather rich model of Bill’s mind. At least some part of that model concerns Bill’s state of attention. Abel’s model of Bill’s attention includes the following three complex chunks of information. First, awareness is present. Second, the awareness originates from Bill. Third, the awareness is directed toward the cup. These properties—the property of awareness and its source and target—are bound together into a representation in Abel’s brain.
    In this formulation, Bill’s visual attention is an event in the world to be perceived, and awareness is the perceptual counterpart to it constructed by Abel’s social machinery. Note the distinction between the reality (Bill’s attentional process) and the perceptualmodel of the reality (Abel’s perception that Bill is aware). The reality includes the physics of light entering the eye, the body orientation and gaze direction of Bill, and a large set of hidden neuronal processes in Bill’s brain. The perceptual model of that reality describes an amorphous, somewhat ethereal property of awareness that can be spatially localized at least vaguely to Bill and that, in violation of the physics of optics, emanates from Bill toward the object of his awareness and somehow takes possession of that object. The perceptual model is schematic, implausible from the point of view of physics, but useful for keeping track of Bill’s state and therefore for helping to predict Bill’s behavior. As in all perception, the perceptual model of awareness is useful rather than accurate.
    Consider now the modified situation in which Abel and Bill are the same person. We are always in a social context because we always perceive and interact with ourselves. Abel/Bill focuses visual attention on the coffee cup. Abel/Bill also constructs a model of the attentional process. The model includes the following complex chunks of information: awareness is present, the awareness emanates from me, the awareness is directed at the cup.
    If asked, “Are you aware of the cup?” Abel/Bill’s brain can scan the contents of this model and answer, “Yes.”
    If asked, “What exactly do you mean by your awareness of the cup?” Abel/Bill’s brain can again scan the informational model, abstract properties from it, and on the basis of that information report something like, “My awareness is a feeling, a vividness, an experience, a mental seizing of the stimulus such that I can now choose to react to it. My awareness is located inside me. In a sense it
is
me. It is my mind apprehending something. But the awareness is also linked to the cup. The color, the shape, all of these attributes of the cup have associated with them the property of my being aware of them.” These summaries reflect the brain’s quirky and complex model of the process of attending to something.
    The example of Abel, Bill, and the coffee cup focuses on visual attention and visual awareness. The concept, however, is general.Bill could just as well attend to a coffee cup, a sound, a smell, a feeling, a thought, a movement intention, a recalled memory, or many other cognitive, emotional, and sensory events. In the present theory, awareness is a reconstructed model of attention, and thus anything that can be the