Consciousness and the Social Brain

attention schema, but the answer does not strictly
require
any sophisticated understanding of attention. It requires only a geometric computation. Much of the research on social attention focuses on the low-level task of computing the direction of gaze and therefore misses the more interesting substance of the attention schema.
Question 2

    Is Bill angry?
    This question requires you to reconstruct someone else’s mental state. In answering the question you might use facial cues to guess at Bill’s emotions. But you are not specifically asked about Bill’s attentional state. You are not required to use an attention schema to answer the question.
    It would be wrong, however, to assume that an attention schema is definitely not recruited. Depending on the strategy you use, you might very well rely on an attention schema. One way to answer the question is to figure out which object is in Bill’s attention and then to determine whether that object might make somebody angry. In that approach to answering the question, you are indeed using at least some inner knowledge of attention.
    This example demonstrates how difficult it is to cleanly separate mental processes. A question, even one that seems simple, might tap into a variety of complex processes.
Question 3

    Imagine a back-story. Bill and John are in the park talking about a news item that they both heard on the radio that morning. Apparently, a Siberian tiger escaped from the local zoo and is roving the neighborhood. Suddenly they hear a tiger roaring loudly from the bushes directly behind Bill. The picture shows their immediate reactions.
    At the particular moment captured in the picture, is Bill more aware of the tiger behind him or of the coffee spill in front of him?
    In this case, where Bill is looking has nothing to do with the object of his attention. He is looking at John, but he is probably attending to the noisy tiger behind him. A basic knowledge of the dynamics of attention is required to answer the question. Signals in the brain compete with each other, and the signal with the biggest boost willtend to outcompete and suppress other signals. People attend to salient sensory stimuli, especially dangerous stimuli, and the most salient stimulus present, the tiger roar, will probably outcompete other stimuli. Even a coffee spill, normally an attention-grabbing event, will probably be outcompeted by the tiger roar. In the heat of the moment, Bill may be entirely unaware of the coffee spill. To answer the question, you do not need to plod through these reasons explicitly. You certainly don’t need to know anything about how signals compete in the brain. Your knowledge about attention is implicit. You understand the dynamics of attention intuitively. You can even guess Bill’s likely reactions. Whatever his actions will be, they will be driven by the tiger, not the spilled coffee. He is unlikely to kneel down and help John mop up the spill. He is more likely to run. Your implicit understanding of attention includes a rather sophisticated grasp of its competitive dynamics and an understanding of how attention affects behavior. Here we have tapped into the attention schema and clearly separated it from the low-level task of eye tracking.
    The many examples in this chapter and the previous chapters—not just those involving Bill and John and the spilled coffee but also illusions of other people’s gaze fixed on us from behind, the fad of mesmerism, the strange persistence of the extromission account of vision, the potent sense of awareness that emanates from a ventriloquist’s puppet, and so on—indicate that when we observe others, when we think about other people, among the many aspects of mind and emotion that we reconstruct is attentional state. We intuitively understand the dynamics and behavioral consequences of attention, and we perceive it as awareness originating in other agents.

8
How Do I Distinguish My Awareness from Yours?

    In the previous chapters I suggested that your own private awareness and your ability to attribute awareness to someone else are products of the same machinery in your brain, the machinery for social perception. That machinery computes the property of awareness and can attribute it to you or to others.
    Yet why does your own awareness come with such internal vividness, whereas the awareness you attribute to someone else is so much dimmer? Clearly the process of constructing your own awareness cannot be precisely the same