Dijksterhuis and Aarts define:
Goals - the mental representation of behaviours or behavioural outcomes that are associated with positive effect. They determine our actions.
Volition - also called the will. The process by which we "decide" to engage in a particular behaviour.
Consciousness - the ability to be aware.
Unconscious - all the psychological processes of which we are not aware at any given moment.
Attention - the extent to which incoming information is processed.
Introduction
Achieving goals generates a sense of agency or willfulness in individuals as the realisation occurs that accomplishment is a result of direct action and consequence. Dijksterhuis and Aarts state that volition is a fundamental feature of self-image.
Traditionally, it has been assumed that individuals find resolution based on conscious decision (e.g. buying a pair of jeans, ordering pizza). It is also accepted that a variety of instruction bypasses consciousness (e.g. automation). Consciousness in behaviour was thought to be a necessary component to evoking volition. Libet, et al. created a stir by shaking the concept to the core with their experiment in conscious decision. Participants were requested to move their index finger according to individual will. Results were analysed based on movement, reported conscious decision to start movement, and brain readiness potential. Conscious decision preceded movement by 0.25/second (on average). Readiness potentials were observed as occurring at one second before consciousness.
Libet's work was considered controversial. Interpretation leads to contending that movement still starts with a conscious decision (e.g. the experimenter tells the participant to move a finger). Dijksterhuis and Aarts indicate that:
- participants consciously decide when to make the actual movement;
- but not whether to make the decision in the first place.
Soon, et al. extended Libet's work in 2008 and changed the paradigm. They stated "participants not only choose when to engage in a specific act, but also which one of two possible acts to make" (pg. 2). In replicating Libet's experiment Soon, et al. found:
Pessiglioni, et al. experimented on participants subliminally primed for each trial to ascertain strength of motivation. Increased hand grip, and skin conductance and activation was observed in the ventral palladium, an area known to be dedicated to emotional and motivational output of the limbic system. Other research by Bijleveld, Custers and Aarts indicates that individuals apply themselves more fully by recruiting more resources when there is a high concentration of subliminal reward cues, and only if the reward required intense focus (e.g. when we can perceive the effects of concentrated attention). Dijksterhuis and Aarts state that "people use reward information in a strategic manner to recruit resources, without this information ever reaching conscious awareness" (pg. 3).
A growing body of literature from social cognition substantiates the fact that by setting goals, an individual can affect higher cognitive processes and consequently set overt behaviour without conscious awareness of the goal. In trials where words such as "strive" or "succeed" were introduced subliminally to prime an achievement goal, participants outperformed those who had not been primed. Goal priming enhances the qualities that are associated with motivational states or goal-directedness (e.g. persistence, increased effort). Dijksterhuis and Aarts state in summary that:
Goals, attention and consciousness
The authors review literature from social psychology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience on the relation between goals, attention and (un)consciousness. The start or reference point to almost all behaviour is a goal. The predominant view that goals are rewarding to attain indicates that goal related behaviour control cognitive and motivational processes. Therefore, behaviours or outcomes that occur as a result of action can be attributed to having goals that are sustained and motivated by the environment.
There is an abundance of literature to support how goals can be activated by features of the environment. Dijksterhuis and Aarts summarise that the representative behaviour becomes positively and unconsciously attached to a goal that motivates and sustains the individual.
Attention refers to the selective process of one aspect while ignoring those that are considered irrelevant. An estimated one million fibers leave each human eye and signifies that we have 1Mb of raw data per second coming at us. Processing all this information at higher levels is impossible as higher-level cognition and behaviour has limited information-processing capacity. Attention enables selected stimuli and actions for the reduced capacity process. In sensory analysis, information-processing does not require the attention it does in later stages and in increasing proportion. Attention is a limited resource, and as such some processes will continue, while others fade out.
Incoming information is processed by a bottom up (exogenous) and top down (endogenous) system. Exogenous refers to the stimulus that is instinctive or of learned biological significance. In top down situations, active goals determine the amount and duration of attention received. Goal related information is attended to much more than incoming information with perceived low priority. Stability of focus and flexibility distinguish the balance required that is critical to goal achievement. Disruptions of the balance leads to inferior performance.
Dijksterhuis and Aarts define consciousness thus: the ability to verbalise an awareness of some aspects of a process. All conscious process is accompanied by or is residual of an unconscious process. While attention can be directed to pursue a goal driven activity, certain aspects of the process may not reach consciousness at all. Goals modulate behavioural effects.
The relation between attention and consciousness
Dijksterhuis and Aarts state that there is no one categorical relation between attention and consciousness. Confusion arises as attention (particularly top down) and consciousness are related to experience. As levels of attention an individual pays to an incoming stimulus increases, corresponding levels of directed awareness similarly increase.
Recent research has a specific focus on understanding the distinction between attention and consciousness. Psychologically processes fall into a 2 x 2 taxonomic cell structure:
- readiness potential in the supplementary motor area (SMA) before the participants reported making a conscious decision as to which act to engage in; and
- activity predictive of the specific act in the frontal and parietal cortex up to ten seconds before the actual act.
Pessiglioni, et al. experimented on participants subliminally primed for each trial to ascertain strength of motivation. Increased hand grip, and skin conductance and activation was observed in the ventral palladium, an area known to be dedicated to emotional and motivational output of the limbic system. Other research by Bijleveld, Custers and Aarts indicates that individuals apply themselves more fully by recruiting more resources when there is a high concentration of subliminal reward cues, and only if the reward required intense focus (e.g. when we can perceive the effects of concentrated attention). Dijksterhuis and Aarts state that "people use reward information in a strategic manner to recruit resources, without this information ever reaching conscious awareness" (pg. 3).
A growing body of literature from social cognition substantiates the fact that by setting goals, an individual can affect higher cognitive processes and consequently set overt behaviour without conscious awareness of the goal. In trials where words such as "strive" or "succeed" were introduced subliminally to prime an achievement goal, participants outperformed those who had not been primed. Goal priming enhances the qualities that are associated with motivational states or goal-directedness (e.g. persistence, increased effort). Dijksterhuis and Aarts state in summary that:
individuals "become consciously aware of an act only after they unconsciously decide to engage in it" (pg. 3); volitional behaviour does not require any consciousness at all; which means goals and motivation can be unconsciously primed.Dijksterhuis and Aarts focus on exploring how goals, attention, and consciousness are linked to better understand how individuals can be more goal directed and display volitional behaviour without conscious awareness. The authors contend that goals and attention have the leading role and are the main characters in the 'play' Volitional Behaviour where:
- goals guide attention and consequent expression; and
- goals and attention are largely independent of consciousness.
Goals, attention and consciousness
The authors review literature from social psychology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience on the relation between goals, attention and (un)consciousness. The start or reference point to almost all behaviour is a goal. The predominant view that goals are rewarding to attain indicates that goal related behaviour control cognitive and motivational processes. Therefore, behaviours or outcomes that occur as a result of action can be attributed to having goals that are sustained and motivated by the environment.
There is an abundance of literature to support how goals can be activated by features of the environment. Dijksterhuis and Aarts summarise that the representative behaviour becomes positively and unconsciously attached to a goal that motivates and sustains the individual.
Attention refers to the selective process of one aspect while ignoring those that are considered irrelevant. An estimated one million fibers leave each human eye and signifies that we have 1Mb of raw data per second coming at us. Processing all this information at higher levels is impossible as higher-level cognition and behaviour has limited information-processing capacity. Attention enables selected stimuli and actions for the reduced capacity process. In sensory analysis, information-processing does not require the attention it does in later stages and in increasing proportion. Attention is a limited resource, and as such some processes will continue, while others fade out.
Incoming information is processed by a bottom up (exogenous) and top down (endogenous) system. Exogenous refers to the stimulus that is instinctive or of learned biological significance. In top down situations, active goals determine the amount and duration of attention received. Goal related information is attended to much more than incoming information with perceived low priority. Stability of focus and flexibility distinguish the balance required that is critical to goal achievement. Disruptions of the balance leads to inferior performance.
Dijksterhuis and Aarts define consciousness thus: the ability to verbalise an awareness of some aspects of a process. All conscious process is accompanied by or is residual of an unconscious process. While attention can be directed to pursue a goal driven activity, certain aspects of the process may not reach consciousness at all. Goals modulate behavioural effects.
The relation between attention and consciousness
Dijksterhuis and Aarts state that there is no one categorical relation between attention and consciousness. Confusion arises as attention (particularly top down) and consciousness are related to experience. As levels of attention an individual pays to an incoming stimulus increases, corresponding levels of directed awareness similarly increase.
Recent research has a specific focus on understanding the distinction between attention and consciousness. Psychologically processes fall into a 2 x 2 taxonomic cell structure:
- whether stimuli are attended to, or not;
- whether they are reportable, or not (consciously aware of them).
Priming research results indicate stimuli that do not reach consciousness can influence psychological processes (includes overt behaviour), but that some degree of attention is necessary. Wenger and Smart applied the 2 x 2 model to distinguish between activation level and consciousness. They found:
- a state of no activation (no attention, no consciousness);
- a state of full activation (both attention and consciousness);
- a state of deep activation (stimuli that are attended to but are unconscious e.g. suppressed thoughts); and
- a state of surface activation (stimuli that are not attended to but are conscious e.g. daydreaming or free association).
The relation between goals and consciousness
Goals are part of knowledge networks. It is believed that goals direct unconscious behaviour. Knowledge networks include representations of goals (e.g. the actions, procedures, situations and objects that help manifest the goal). Goal-directed behaviour can be activated by influences external to the individual. Knowledge networks motivate individuals to act with intention. Therefore, goal representations can be primed to interact with behavioural and contextual information.
An element of research in unconscious goal pursuits deal with habit forming processes. Identification and practice of effective action in relevant situations. Unconscious instigation of a goal occurs when goal-directed behaviour has been performed frequently and is a habit.
Goal priming studies have demonstrated that skills that have not previously been used may become associated with the goal. Research required participants to eat a crumbly biscuit. Participants were simultaneously exposed to the scent of all-purpose cleaner because it was "assumed to enhance the accessibility of the goal of cleaning" (pg. 7). Participants exposed to the scent made more effort to keep their direct environment tidy. Dijskterhuis and Aarts state that goal activation encourages individuals to try new things in different places without having awareness of the operation of the goal. Goal contagion can be inferred from others' actions. Subsequent behaviour is controlled without conscious intent by the perceiver. Goals may automatically activate when significant others are involved. Research by Fitzsimons and Bargh shows that goals and attributed goal related behaviour can be activated when individuals are exposed to the names of intimates. The habitual goal is primed and resultant behaviour is naturally occurring. Priming members of social groups that contain representations of goals automatically leads to the pursuit of goals.
The observation that goal pursuits may be activated unconsciously suggests that conscious intention and goals are distinct concepts that are served by different processes and brain networks, and can operate independently. While intention is a reference to conscious decisions made on obtaining behavioural goals, goals are the representations of desired states that guide overt behaviour without conscious awareness.
The relation between goals and attention
Dijksterhuis and Aarts state that "attention is a functional process that selects and biases the incoming flow of information and internal representations in the service of effective goal achievement" (pg. 8). Content of attention is representative of goals that are active in that moment. One key role is for attention to translate goals into overt behaviour. Temporal and spatial aspects must be considered as goals cannot always be translated in the same situation. 'Interfering information' (e.g. information that conflicts with individual goal setting behaviour) from the social environment needs to be ignored or inhibited to ensure effective goal directed performance. Dijksterhuis and Aarts state that attention:
- orients and signals the individual towards goal relevant information; and
- supervises the translation of goals into behaviour.
Results indicate that goals modulate attention processes, regardless of conscious or unconscious source activation of the goal.
Research on working memory shows that semantic items decay within seconds if not made use of by goal related functions or intervention. Studies show that participants primed towards a goal were able to access representations of the goal, but activation fades when the desire to achieve the goal is gone (e.g. giving in to a late night snack when on a diet).
In summary, Dijksterhuis and Aarts state that goals can be translated into overt behaviour without individual conscious awareness of the activation and operation of the goal. The attention that operates on higher cognitive processes supports unconscious goal pursuit.
Implicit learning
Learning regularities allows us to anticipate events. Rules of predictive engagement are significant in optimally guiding goal directed behaviour (e.g. what actions are needed to achieve a goal). Dijksterhuis and Aarts state that we unconsciously learn complex rules and regularities from the bottom up. Often this type of learning requires no speech (e.g. we learn grammatical rules without being able to explain said rules). Dijksterhuis and Aarts state that the exact nature of what is learned without conscious guidance is still debated. Eitam, Hassin and Schul clearly demonstrated that participants who have been primed to achieve outperformed control participants, indicating that primed participants implicitly learned more. It was noted that neither group were able to eloquently describe what they had learned. Dijksterhuis and Aarts state that goals affect implicit learning without improving conscious recognition of what has been learned.
Learning mechanisms rely on bottom up processes (e.g. associative learning) that operate without conscious awareness. Top down learning (e.g. predictive relations or rule based learning) is assumed to require conscious awareness. Alonso, Fuentes and Hommel explicitly tested to ascertain that learning is a bi-directional process (e.g. if we make the association/relation from target to object, can we also learn from object to target). Findings suggest that bi-directional associations (memory structures) are formed without awareness. An awareness of predictive relations between target and object forms uni-directional structures. Goal priming leads to uni-directional memory structures. Conscious awareness is therefore not the determining factor that shows how predictive relations are required. Acquisition relies on unconscious attention to process relevant goals.
Evaluative conditioning
Dijksterhuis and Aarts describe evaluative conditioning as crucial to shaping preferences and goals. Studies show that evaluative conditioning occurs when a conditioned stimulus or unconditioned stimulus is subliminally primed. Krosnick, et al. showed participants slides of a target performing a daily task. Slides of either a child holding a doll or a blood spattered shark were placed before each target slide for 13 milliseconds. Participants rated the target paired with the positive image as being more personable.
The question that conscious awareness as a necessary component of evaluative conditioning continues to be debated, but recent research by Field and Moore suggests that the central role belongs to attention. Participants exposed to normal situations could process conditioned stimuli. Participants were given a distractor task that depleted attention. Individuals who stayed focused on their task showed evaluative conditioning effects.
Pleyers, et al. suggest that contingency awareness be measured on each unconditioned stimulus-conditioned stimulus combination as it related to the participant rather than through measurement of the participant. Their study showed the effects of evaluative conditioning when participants were aware of conditioned stimulus-unconditioned stimulus combinations. Participants showed no evaluative conditioning effects when they were not aware of conditioned stimulus-unconditioned stimulus. Dijksterhuis and Aarts indicate that close evaluation of their work indicates that while the majority of participants were aware of the conditioned stimulus-unconditioned stimulus couplings, some participants had no awareness of pairings. There were no instances of participants being aware of only some pairings. The results on conditioning with subliminal stimuli indicate that "it is more likely that the seeming contingency awareness is merely the consequence of some other factor that is necessary for conditioning, most likely attention" (pg. 13). It was noted that process-driven attention is a necessary component for evaluative conditioning to occur. Evaluative conditioning effects are noticeably stronger for individuals who are highly-involved and score high in perception.
Unconscious thought
When making choices, it was traditionally thought that conscious deliberation helped form preference. In studies where participants were shown a selection of apartments with a range of attributes, one group was asked to make a decision as soon as they had read the information, while another group were given time before having to decide, and the third group was given a working memory task preventing conscious thought before making their decision. This latter group used unconscious thought to make decisions that were more accurate when compared with the previous two groups (i.e. participants remembered the positive attributes of the apartments).
Evidence suggests unconscious thought is a goal-dependent process. When participants were asked to make a decision, one group was informed that there would be further questions. The group that had to retain information in working memory had the goal to further process the given information. The second group had no such goal and results show that the first group outperformed the second group. Dijksterhuis and Aarts indicate that unconscious thought is goal-dependent. Without goals in decision making, unconscious thought is not evoked.
Dijksterhuis and Aarts note that there is "considerable resistance" (pg. 14) in accepting that people think unconsciously. Preliminary results show that when participants are actively involved in a task and distracted by unconscious thought, the success of unconscious thought competes with activity showing that unconscious thought requires working memory resources (e.g. when our eyes read data, but haven't processed the information because we're thinking of something else). Dijksterhuis and Aarts note distinct evidence that indicates implicit learning, evaluative conditioning and unconscious thought are goal directed and require attention.
Focus, flexibility and the two-faced role of consciousness
The creation and maintenance of goal pursuit involves volitional behaviour. However, individuals must reflect on established goals to adjust desired states with actual states in order to maintain progress. In addition, new and emerging goals compete for attention. The challenge is to remain focused on maintaining and stablising goals. As circumstance changes, flexibility is required to adjust behaviour to adapt. Both aspects are required for optimal goal pursuit as volitional behaviour adapts to a context-dependent balance.
The rewards and requirements associated with individual motivation to succeed is found in the balance between focus and flexibility which can occur without conscious awareness. The motivation and intention to act on goals emerges from the unconscious interactions between goal representations and positive affect (incentive).
Dijksterhuis and Aarts state that individuals notice their unconscious goals when the balance between focus and flexibility is impaired. Unconscious goals reach consciousness incrementally when progress is blocked. Dijksterhuis and Aarts propose that when consciousness occurs in conjunction with and directs the impaired balance of focus and flexibility, results may improve adaptive behaviour and performance. But if an individual is balanced in focus and flexibility, consciousness does not enhance performance. Conversely, it is seen to jeopardise performance as constant self-evaluation disturbs the balance of behaviour. Benefits to consciousness in an impaired balance occur in situations where individuals face deadlock. The implication is that a new or never before executed planned course of action is considered (e.g. double-loop learning). Global Workspace Theory proposes that consciousness facilitates activity and integrated brain functions to prepare the individual for the upcoming situation.
Conclusion
Dijksterhuis and Aarts state that what we want and what we focus our attention on is representative of the goals we will achieve. Goals engage volitional behaviour by modulating attention. In general, our attention is focused on information that serves our goals.
Goal pursuit can be an entirely unconscious procedure. Whether implicit learning, evaluative conditioning, and unconscious thought can proceed without conscious guidance is a current debate. Recent research reveals that these processes are goal and attention dependent, not conscious dependent. Attention acts to maintain the balance between focus and flexibility when pursuing goals. Becoming overly self-aware leads to a disruption of natural balance that affects goal orientation (focus is diverted).
Summary points:
Research on working memory shows that semantic items decay within seconds if not made use of by goal related functions or intervention. Studies show that participants primed towards a goal were able to access representations of the goal, but activation fades when the desire to achieve the goal is gone (e.g. giving in to a late night snack when on a diet).
In summary, Dijksterhuis and Aarts state that goals can be translated into overt behaviour without individual conscious awareness of the activation and operation of the goal. The attention that operates on higher cognitive processes supports unconscious goal pursuit.
Implicit learning
Learning regularities allows us to anticipate events. Rules of predictive engagement are significant in optimally guiding goal directed behaviour (e.g. what actions are needed to achieve a goal). Dijksterhuis and Aarts state that we unconsciously learn complex rules and regularities from the bottom up. Often this type of learning requires no speech (e.g. we learn grammatical rules without being able to explain said rules). Dijksterhuis and Aarts state that the exact nature of what is learned without conscious guidance is still debated. Eitam, Hassin and Schul clearly demonstrated that participants who have been primed to achieve outperformed control participants, indicating that primed participants implicitly learned more. It was noted that neither group were able to eloquently describe what they had learned. Dijksterhuis and Aarts state that goals affect implicit learning without improving conscious recognition of what has been learned.
Learning mechanisms rely on bottom up processes (e.g. associative learning) that operate without conscious awareness. Top down learning (e.g. predictive relations or rule based learning) is assumed to require conscious awareness. Alonso, Fuentes and Hommel explicitly tested to ascertain that learning is a bi-directional process (e.g. if we make the association/relation from target to object, can we also learn from object to target). Findings suggest that bi-directional associations (memory structures) are formed without awareness. An awareness of predictive relations between target and object forms uni-directional structures. Goal priming leads to uni-directional memory structures. Conscious awareness is therefore not the determining factor that shows how predictive relations are required. Acquisition relies on unconscious attention to process relevant goals.
Evaluative conditioning
Dijksterhuis and Aarts describe evaluative conditioning as crucial to shaping preferences and goals. Studies show that evaluative conditioning occurs when a conditioned stimulus or unconditioned stimulus is subliminally primed. Krosnick, et al. showed participants slides of a target performing a daily task. Slides of either a child holding a doll or a blood spattered shark were placed before each target slide for 13 milliseconds. Participants rated the target paired with the positive image as being more personable.
The question that conscious awareness as a necessary component of evaluative conditioning continues to be debated, but recent research by Field and Moore suggests that the central role belongs to attention. Participants exposed to normal situations could process conditioned stimuli. Participants were given a distractor task that depleted attention. Individuals who stayed focused on their task showed evaluative conditioning effects.
Pleyers, et al. suggest that contingency awareness be measured on each unconditioned stimulus-conditioned stimulus combination as it related to the participant rather than through measurement of the participant. Their study showed the effects of evaluative conditioning when participants were aware of conditioned stimulus-unconditioned stimulus combinations. Participants showed no evaluative conditioning effects when they were not aware of conditioned stimulus-unconditioned stimulus. Dijksterhuis and Aarts indicate that close evaluation of their work indicates that while the majority of participants were aware of the conditioned stimulus-unconditioned stimulus couplings, some participants had no awareness of pairings. There were no instances of participants being aware of only some pairings. The results on conditioning with subliminal stimuli indicate that "it is more likely that the seeming contingency awareness is merely the consequence of some other factor that is necessary for conditioning, most likely attention" (pg. 13). It was noted that process-driven attention is a necessary component for evaluative conditioning to occur. Evaluative conditioning effects are noticeably stronger for individuals who are highly-involved and score high in perception.
Unconscious thought
When making choices, it was traditionally thought that conscious deliberation helped form preference. In studies where participants were shown a selection of apartments with a range of attributes, one group was asked to make a decision as soon as they had read the information, while another group were given time before having to decide, and the third group was given a working memory task preventing conscious thought before making their decision. This latter group used unconscious thought to make decisions that were more accurate when compared with the previous two groups (i.e. participants remembered the positive attributes of the apartments).
Evidence suggests unconscious thought is a goal-dependent process. When participants were asked to make a decision, one group was informed that there would be further questions. The group that had to retain information in working memory had the goal to further process the given information. The second group had no such goal and results show that the first group outperformed the second group. Dijksterhuis and Aarts indicate that unconscious thought is goal-dependent. Without goals in decision making, unconscious thought is not evoked.
Dijksterhuis and Aarts note that there is "considerable resistance" (pg. 14) in accepting that people think unconsciously. Preliminary results show that when participants are actively involved in a task and distracted by unconscious thought, the success of unconscious thought competes with activity showing that unconscious thought requires working memory resources (e.g. when our eyes read data, but haven't processed the information because we're thinking of something else). Dijksterhuis and Aarts note distinct evidence that indicates implicit learning, evaluative conditioning and unconscious thought are goal directed and require attention.
Focus, flexibility and the two-faced role of consciousness
The creation and maintenance of goal pursuit involves volitional behaviour. However, individuals must reflect on established goals to adjust desired states with actual states in order to maintain progress. In addition, new and emerging goals compete for attention. The challenge is to remain focused on maintaining and stablising goals. As circumstance changes, flexibility is required to adjust behaviour to adapt. Both aspects are required for optimal goal pursuit as volitional behaviour adapts to a context-dependent balance.
The rewards and requirements associated with individual motivation to succeed is found in the balance between focus and flexibility which can occur without conscious awareness. The motivation and intention to act on goals emerges from the unconscious interactions between goal representations and positive affect (incentive).
Dijksterhuis and Aarts state that individuals notice their unconscious goals when the balance between focus and flexibility is impaired. Unconscious goals reach consciousness incrementally when progress is blocked. Dijksterhuis and Aarts propose that when consciousness occurs in conjunction with and directs the impaired balance of focus and flexibility, results may improve adaptive behaviour and performance. But if an individual is balanced in focus and flexibility, consciousness does not enhance performance. Conversely, it is seen to jeopardise performance as constant self-evaluation disturbs the balance of behaviour. Benefits to consciousness in an impaired balance occur in situations where individuals face deadlock. The implication is that a new or never before executed planned course of action is considered (e.g. double-loop learning). Global Workspace Theory proposes that consciousness facilitates activity and integrated brain functions to prepare the individual for the upcoming situation.
Conclusion
Dijksterhuis and Aarts state that what we want and what we focus our attention on is representative of the goals we will achieve. Goals engage volitional behaviour by modulating attention. In general, our attention is focused on information that serves our goals.
Goal pursuit can be an entirely unconscious procedure. Whether implicit learning, evaluative conditioning, and unconscious thought can proceed without conscious guidance is a current debate. Recent research reveals that these processes are goal and attention dependent, not conscious dependent. Attention acts to maintain the balance between focus and flexibility when pursuing goals. Becoming overly self-aware leads to a disruption of natural balance that affects goal orientation (focus is diverted).
Summary points:
- attention is largely determined by goals;
- consciousness and attention may be correlated in real life (such that stimuli that are attended to are more likely to enter consciousness), but they are independent;
- processes that we think we may need consciousness for are usually dependent on attention and not consciousness;
- goal pursuit is dependent on both focus (the ability to keep the same information active) and flexibility (the ability to respond to changing circumstances);
- attention is responsible for a balance between focus and flexibility; and
- conscious intervention may help to restore the balance between focus and flexibility, however it may disturb an already appropriate balance.
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