Consciousness and the Social Brain

determine where the person is looking. The device is far more accurate, actually, than a human observer. Does the eye tracker perceive consciousness in the person whose eyes it is tracking? Of course it doesn’t. If you put fake eyeballs on a machine and attach an eye tracker to that same machine such that it can track its own eye position, does that mean the machine has become a conscious being? No. Therefore, the theory must be wrong.
    I find this criticism to be superficial because it so obviously misunderstands the theory. I believe the origin of the criticism lies in the social-attention literature, in which essentially all work is devoted to the issue of the eyes. How does one person know where another person is looking? The experiments described in the previous section focus entirely on how person A monitors the gaze of person B. The idea has gotten into the scientific culture that social attention is a matter of computing a gaze vector. Baron-Cohen’s proposed mechanism is after all the eye direction detector (EDD). The concept has fossilized into an acronym.
    Given this prevailing bias, perhaps it is easy for scientists to misunderstand the attention schema theory. It may be easy to mistake the attention schema itself for a mere eye tracker. How can an eye tracker, an eye direction detector, be responsible for awareness?
    It isn’t. Eye tracking is too narrow an understanding of the attention schema.
    Eye position is certainly a useful cue for reconstructing someone’s attentional state. Consider, however, two blind people talking to each other. By voice, by emotional nuance, by the implicit and explicit message of the words, each one is able to reconstruct something about the other person’s attention. What thought is the other attending to? What idea? What sound? What emotion lies at thecurrent center of attention? What does it mean to pay attention, in terms of deeper processing and impact on behavior? No eye tracking is occurring.
    In the present theory, eye tracking is not necessary. It is merely a useful peripheral cue. It may be a dominant cue, but without it other sensory cues can stand in. The sensory cues themselves are not at the center of the theory. What is important is the rich informational representation of attentional state that is constructed on the basis of the cues.
    In the attention schema theory, the human brain constructs a model of what it
means
to pay attention to something. An eye tracker, alas, does no such thing. It merely registers that a person’s eyes are pointed in a particular direction.
    In Chapter 5 , I compared the attention schema to the body schema. Students who are new to thinking about the body schema sometimes make a similar mistake: they confuse the body schema for a registry of joint angles. Sensors in the joints can detect joint angle. By pooling information from many joints, you could track the body’s configuration and movement. But this simple sensory tracking is not the same as a body schema. The body schema pulls together information from many sources—sensors in the joints, vision of the arm, expectation, prior knowledge about the structure of the body, and so on. On the basis of that converging information, a simulation of the body is constructed. The simulation can be used to understand and predict the physical consequences of movement.
    Similarly, we do indeed track eye position in other people and also in ourselves. Eye position is one clue to one aspect of attention. It can help inform the attention schema. But the attention schema should not be confused with an eye tracker.
Probing the Attention Schema with a Picture

    In psychology, when a mental trait is proposed, one way to define it more precisely is to find a test that probes for it. Can we find a testsuch that, if you have an attention schema, you can answer the questions correctly, and if you don’t you can’t?

    FIGURE 7.4
A cartoon to help demonstrate the attention schema. Given a story to explain the situation in the cartoon, you are able to intuitively understand the attentional states of the characters.

    In the cartoon in Figure 7.4 , Bill and John are looking at each other in apparent shock while John drops a cup of coffee. Consider some questions about the picture.
Question 1

    Is Bill’s gaze directed toward John’s face or toward John’s hand?
    This question asks explicitly about the direction of gaze. If you answer a question of this nature, you might activate your