Consciousness and Cognition 9, 243259 (2000) doi:10.1006/ccog.2000.0442, available online at http://www.idealibrary.

com on

A Neurofunctional Theory of Visual Consciousness

Jesse Prinz
Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program, Department of Philosophy, Washington University, Campus Box 1073, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, Missouri 63130-4899 E-mail: jesse@twinearth.wustl.edu This paper develops an empirically motivated theory of visual consciousness. It begins by outlining neuropsychological support for Jackendoff s (1987) hypothesis that visual consciousness involves mental representations at an intermediate level of processing. It then supplements that hypothesis with the further requirement that attention, which can come under the direction of high level representations, is also necessary for consciousness. The resulting theory is shown to have a number of philosophical consequences. If correct, higher-order thought accounts, the multiple drafts account, and the widely held belief that sensation precedes perception will all be found wanting. The theory will also be used to illustrate and defend a methodology that lls the gulf between functionalists who ignore the brain and neural reductionists who repudiate functionalism. 2000 Academic
Press

Over the past few years, the number of philosophical theories of consciousness has proliferated. This proliferation has been fueled by well-publicized efforts to bring consciousness under empirical scrutiny. Central to these efforts have been attempts to locate the neural substrates of conscious experience. Philosophers have found some inspiration in this empirical work. We have supplemented our thought experiments with descriptions of actual brain disorders that are being investigated in hospitals and laboratories around the world. Our theories are now informed by the case studies whose exotic reality we are forced to accommodate. Nevertheless, much philosophical output is still produced from the armchair. Empirical ndings are conveniently deployed to dress up conceptually motivated accounts. Few philosophers have appropriated detailed ndings from cognitive neuropsychology, let alone built theories around them. I would like to reverse the order of business. I suggest that we begin by seeing what kind of story is dictated by the lessons of the lab and then see whether our philosophical theories and distinctions hold up under the microscope. Toward that end, I will begin by sketching a neurally informed theory of conscious experience that accords with empirical results. I will then use this theory, and the methodology behind it, as a litmus to briey assess some of the proposals that have been suggested by other philosophers. The discussion proceeds in three parts. Section 1 describes the neural bases of stages in visual processing, Section 2 develops a theory of visual consciousness, and Section 3 explores philosophical ramications.

This article is part of a special issue of this journal on Metacognition and Consciousness, with Thomas O. Nelson and Georges Rey as Guest Editors. 243 1053-8100/00 $35.00
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1. LOCATING VISUAL CONSCIOUSNESS

1.1. Marrs Levels If one begins with empirical ndings, it is sensible to start with a restricted goal. Not every aspect of consciousness has been empirically explored in equal detail. The most carefully studied phenomenon has been visual consciousness, the kind of experience that accompanies visual perception. Therefore, visual consciousness is a natural starting place. One can hope that a theory of visual consciousness will generalizethat other modalities, at least, will give rise to conscious experience in much the same way. For the purposes of this discussion, I will remain largely neutral about that question (though see Section 2.5). An account of visual consciousness must ultimately cohere with an account of visual perception. Computational cognitive psychologists often characterize visual perception as a multistage process. Three major stages are generally identied, and dubbed low-, intermediate-, and high-level vision. Each stage encodes different information about a stimulus and then passes that information onto the next stage for further processing. An inuential characterization of these levels is found in Marrs (1982) celebrated theory. Though wrong in detail, I will assume that Marrs partition is essentially correct. The information encoded in low-level vision is a retinotopically organized collection of blobs and edges. Marr calls representations at this level primal sketches. On his account, intermediate-level vision encodes information about surfaces, depth and shape from the viewers perspective. Here, representations are called 21/2D sketches. High-level vision yields viewpoint invariant structural descriptions of objects, which can be matched with stored representations to achieve object recognition. These are Marrs 3D models. Ray Jackendoff (1987) has argued that Marrs intermediate-level, the 21/2D sketch, is the locale of visual consciousness or phenomenal awareness (I will use such terms interchangeably). This hypothesis enjoys empirical support. Some of that support comes from neuroscience. The brain region that corresponds best with this level of visual processing is also the best candidate for a locale of visual consciousness. Or so I shall presently argue. It will turn out, however, that this story needs to be slightly embellished, for mere activity at the intermediate level does not seem to be sufcient for visual experience. 1.2. Visual Levels in the Brain Cognitive neuropsychologists have corroborated the claim that visual information is processed in successive stages. The functional characteristics of these stages and their patterns of interaction have not coincided perfectly with Marrs account, but the mapping is close enough to be of interest. Although no consensus exists, there are some widely accepted opinions about which regions of the brain are most closely correlated with Marrs levels. Low-level vision is generally associated with primary visual cortex or V1. Here information is encoded in retinotopically arranged cells that respond selectively to wavelength, movement, and edges at various orientations. At this stage, too little processing has occurred to support recognition tasks. Intermediate-level vision is best correlated with extrastriate cortical regions. Here,

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FIG. 1.

Levels of visual processing and some possible neural correlates.

information is parceled out from the lower level into specialized processors, which yield information about shadow, color, shape, and motion (Zeki, 1992). Like Marrs intermediate level, extrastriate cortex typically encodes shape information using viewer-centered coordinates. The most natural candidate for the neural substrate of Marrs object-centered high level of representation is inferotemporal cortex (IT). Cells in this region are more indifferent to the size, orientation, and position of objects in the visual eld. Lesion studies and neuroimaging conrm that this is also the primary locale of object recognition. There are important differences between the neural systems involved in visual perception and those identied by Marr. For example, stereoscopic depth is computed in V1, but not in Marrs low level (Poggio & Poggio, 1984); Marr does not describe the division of labor in the extrastriate regions that are correlated with his intermediate level (Zeki, 1992), and the high-level processors in IT might not decompose objects into volumetric primitives as Marr supposed (Tanaka, 1992). Despite these differences, neuroscience divides visual processing into several stages and these can be constructively, if loosely, compared to Marrs. The key points of this comparison are summarized in Fig. 1. 1.3. The Locale of Consciousness Following Jackendoff, it is natural to ask whether any one of these processing levels could qualify as the locale of visual consciousness. As I will use the term, the locale of visual consciousness is a level (or area) that is active during conscious experience and encodes information that is available in conscious experience. At rst blush, the low level of visual processing seems to be the most obvious candidate for the locale of visual consciousness. The destruction of V1, the main neural correlate of low-level vision, apparently results in the loss of visual experience. Still, there is mounting evidence that V1 cannot be the locale of consciousness (see Crick & Koch, 1995, and Koch & Braun, 1996, for reviews). For one thing, visual hallucination can occur for a period after V1 has been destroyed (Seguin, 1886). Similarly, some subjects who experience blindsight after V1 damage continue to have phenomenal experiences in the blind elds under certain conditions (Weiskrantz,

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FIG. 2.

Illusory contours in a Kanizsa triangle.

1997). As Crick and Koch emphasize, V1 also seems to lack information that is available to consciousness. First, our experience of colors can remain constant across dramatic changes in wavelengths (Land, 1964). Zeki (1983) has shown that such color constancy is not registered V1. Second, V1 does not seem responsive to illusory contours across gaps in a visual array (von der Heydt, Peterhans, & Baumgartner, 1984). If V1 were the locale of consciousness, we would not experience the lines in a Kanizsa triangle (Fig. 2). The fact that consciousness is lost when V1 is destroyed is, therefore, better interpreted as evidence that V1 is a primary source of inputs to another region in which consciousness can rightfully be said to reside. It would also be implausible to locate consciousness in high-level visual processors. If Marr is right, high-level vision represents objects using object-centered structural descriptions. These abstract away from aspects of vantage point, including orientation, size, and position. In contrast, our visual experience of objects always presents them from a particular vantage point (Jackendoff, 1987). Moreover, there is neurological evidence that we can have visual phenomenology even when we lose access to the high-level representations in IT. This is presumably what happens in cases of associative agnosia in which subjects can accurately draw visual stimuli without being able to identify them (Farah, 1990). Heres where the intermediate level comes in. Jackendoff locates consciousness in the intermediate level on computational and psychological grounds. As Crick and Koch (1995) have emphasized, this proposal enjoys further neuropsychological support. First, there is evidence from brain lesions that extrastriate cortex is necessary for visual consciousness. For example, a form of color blindnesss, or achromatopsia, results from V4 damage,1 and motion blindness, or akinetopsia, results from MT damage (Zeki, 1992). Damage in extrastriate areas also seems responsible for apperceptive agnosias in which awareness of form is seriously impaired (Farah, 1990). Studies of healthy brains have supported this case by showing that V4 encodes constant color, V2 encodes illusory contours, and MT encodes illusory motion with a time course that matches our phenomenal experience (Zeki, 1983; von der Heydt et al., 1984; Tootell, Reppas, Dale, Look, Sereno, Brady, & Rosen, 1995). As a working hypothesis, it seems reasonable to conclude that visual consciousness is located in the intermediate-level visual processing systems in extrastriate cortex.
1 David Hilbert tells me that many no longer consider V4 a color area. Some nearby region might be the real locus of color processing and color blindness.

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FIG. 3.

Two fragmented images.

But this hypothesis needs a bit of renement. For one thing, it would be hasty to conclude that mere activity in the intermediate level produces visual phenomenology. In cases of masked priming, rapidly presented visual stimuli can apparently be recognized without entering into awareness. Recognition generally requires processing in all visual areas, including those at the intermediate level. Therefore, mere activity is not enough. Under what conditions, one must ask, do intermediate-level activities enter awareness? I will postpone my answer to this question until Section 2.1, because I must rst describe a range of phenomena that can steer us in the right direction. 1.4. The Contribution of Higher Levels I suggested above that activity in V1 might contribute to visual consciousness by providing inputs to extrastriate regions. I believe that high-level visual areas make an even more substantive contribution. Though not necessary for phenomenology, high-level vision is where objects are interpreted, and interpretation affects phenomenology. There is considerable evidence for this claim. First, consider our experience of fragmented images, like the famous Dalmatian photograph of R. C. James (reproduced in Fig. 3 with another fragmented image). Such images are very difcult to interpret initially but impossible not to interpret once we have gured out what they represent (Rock, 1984). The Dalmatian image is so familiar to most of us that we immediately organize it into the correct boundaries, but rst-time viewers are stumped. Such images cannot be processed bottomup; they seem to require assistance from higher levels of processing. That high-level inuence delivers a meaningful segmentation which transforms our phenomenal experience. The phenomenal impact of interpretation is also evidenced by our experience of multistable gures, which are experienced differently depending on how they are interpreted. Chambers and Reisberg (1992) showed that the mental image we form of a duck-rabbit (Fig. 4) is experienced differently depending on how it is interpreted. They asked subjects to study a duck-rabbit gure until they were able to form vivid mental images of it. Then they showed the same subjects three duck-rabbit gures and asked them to guess which one they had been trained on. One was the original, the second had been slightly altered in the region corresponding to the ducks face,

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FIG. 4.

A duck-rabbit.

and the third had been slightly altered in the region corresponding to the rabbits face. They found that subjects who had interpreted the original gure as a duck were able to rule out the image with the altered duck face, but were at chance at deciding between the two other gures. Those who interpreted the original gure as a rabbit exhibited the opposite pattern. While interpreting a duck-rabbit as a duck, subjects neglect details on rabbit face, and while interpreting it as a rabbit they neglect the duck face. When asked to reconstrue the images in memory, subjects bring the face corresponding to the new interpretation into focus and lose focus of the face corresponding to the original interpretation. This shifting is presumably mediated by highlevel vision. Further evidence for a contribution of high-level areas comes from studying binocular rivalry. When two distinct stimuli are present to each eye, our conscious percept alternates between them. Using single cell recordings, Scheinberg and Logothetis (1997) found that 90% of tested cells in IT correspond to the experienced percept as opposed to 2025% in extrastriate regions. A natural interpretation is that the high-level activity dictates which intermediate-level activities become conscious. It xes on an interpretation and thereby renders the corresponding subset of intermediate neurons conscious. All these considerations suggest that high-level visual systems make a contribution to visual awareness. If awareness is located in the intermediate level, as argued above, this contribution must be explained in terms of an effect that the high level has on intermediate processing. I will now sketch a proposal along those lines.
2. THE AIR THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

2.1. Attention and Awareness How does high-level vision affect the intermediate level? My description of the Chambers and Reisberg research suggests an answer. When we x on an interpretation of the duck-rabbit gure, we seem to focus on those potions of the gure that are most relevant to the interpretation. This is most naturally described as an attentional effect. We preferentially attend to one side of the gure. In cases of binocular rivalry, attention might be responsible for marking the subset of intermediate-level neurons corresponding to the high-level interpretation. Attention might also be used to group together the components of a fragmented picture in ways that respect our interpretation. It is well established that attention increases activity in intermediate-

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FIG. 5.

The circuit that gives rise to consciousness on the AIR theory.

level (and lower-) visual areas (Corbetta, Miezen, Dobmeyer, Shulman, & Petersen, 1991). The phenomena under consideration suggest that such attentional effects can be guided by high-level visual areas. Putting all this together suggests the following picture. When we see a visual stimulus, it is propagated unconsciously through the levels of our visual system. When signals arrive at the high level, interpretation is attempted. If the high level arrives at an interpretation, it sends an efferent signal back into the intermediate level with the aid of attention. Aspects of the intermediate-level representation that are most relevant to interpretation are neurally marked in some way, while others are either unmarked or suppressed. When no interpretation is achieved (as with fragmented images or cases of agnosia), attentional mechanisms might be deployed somewhat differently. They might search or scan the intermediate level, attempting to nd groupings that will lead to an interpretation. Both the interpretation-driven enhancement process and the interpretation-seeking search process might bring the attended portions of the intermediate level into awareness. This proposal can be summarized by saying that visual awareness derives from Attended Intermediate-level Representations (AIRs). The circuit I have described is depicted in Fig. 5. The AIR theory offers an explanation of how high-level vision can inuence phenomenology even though phenomenology is located at the intermediate level. It also contributes to an explanation of the question raised at the end of Section 1.3 regarding the lack of awareness in masked priming. Any interpreted visual stimulus presumably passes through both intermediate- and high-level visual areas. If mere activity in the intermediate level was sufcient for consciousness, the lack of awareness in masked priming would be inexplicable. On the present story, mere activity is not enough. Awareness only occurs after intermediate-level representations are enhanced by attention. This cannot occur in cases of masked priming, because, by the time an interpretation is achieved at the high level, the intermediate-level representation is no longer there to be enhanced. It has been masked by a subsequent stimulus. 2.2. Unilateral Neglect The AIR theory also enjoys support from studies of unilateral neglect. Neglect generally follows lesions to right parietal cortex and results in a lack of awareness of objects and object parts on the contralesional side. Asked to describe or draw a visual stimulus, neglect subjects will omit features on the left. Neglect is generally described as an attention disorder. It is thought that attention mechanisms located in

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FIG. 6. Damage resulting in unilateral neglect.

or mediated by regions of parietal cortex are damaged resulting in impaired phenomenal access. The situation is diagrammed in Fig. 6. Neglect is illuminating in several ways. First, if the standard interpretations are correct, it demonstrates that damage to attentional systems can lead to decits in awareness. In making attention requisite to visual consciousness, the AIR theory predicts this result. Neglect has also provided further evidence that interpretation can occur without awareness. In a fascinating series of studies, it has been discovered that some neglect subjects tacitly process information in their neglected elds (Marshall & Halligan, 1988; Bisiach & Rusconi, 1990). In one case, neglect subjects see two pictures of a vase that are exactly alike except that one has owers extending out on the left-hand side. Because the owers fall in the neglected region, neglect subjects say the two vases look alike and believe that both are empty. They nevertheless claim that they prefer the vase with the owers, unable to provide the correct explanation for this preference. The AIR story explains this by saying such subjects have intact object recognition systems (as in Fig. 6). Their phenomenal decit derives from an attention decit. Without the phenomenological experience of seeing owers, subjects form the false belief that none have been detected. A third phenomenon exhibited in neglect can also be explained on the AIR theory. It has been well established that some cases of neglect are object-based. Subjects neglect the left sides of perceived objects rather than the left side of their visual eld. To show this, Tipper and Behrmann (1996) showed neglect subjects a barbell-shaped frame, formed by two circles and a connecting line. When targets are ashed on the left circle of the barbell frame, neglect subjects fail to detect it, but they do detect targets ashed on the right. The surprising result is that this pattern of response reverses after the subjects see the barbell rotated 180. After witnessing this rotation, neglect subjects fail to detect targets ashed on the right-hand side, the side that had formerly been on the left. They seem to assign an intrinsic axis to the object in the initial trial, and they subsequently neglect the left side of that axis no matter where it appears relative to retinal coordinates. This suggests that the kind of attention that is disrupted in neglect depends on object representations. This coheres with the AIR theory, according to which high-level object representations are formed prior to backprojecting the attention that gives rise to awareness. Attention is directed by prior interpretation. 2.3. Awareness Without Attention? The AIR theory states that visual awareness arises when the high levels of processing direct attention to intermediate-level representations. This implies that aware-

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ness cannot occur without attention. Some might regard this as a fatal implication of the theory. There are some empirical results that suggest we can have awareness without attention. This had led some authors to believe that attention is not necessary for phenomenal experience. Fortunately, I think these results can be readily interpreted in ways that are compatible with the AIR theory. In fact, they provide some evidence in its favor. I will briey consider two studies that claim to show awareness without attention. First, Braun and Julesz (1998) tested the effects of visual pop-out during attentiontaxing discrimination tasks. They found that subjects could detect the color and orientation of peripheral stimuli even when they were presented during shape identication tasks that exhaust attentional resources. From this, they conclude that awareness of color and orientation can occur without being attended to. There are three reasons to think that this result does not contradict the AIR theory. First, the AIR theory says that consciousness occurs after detection, when attention is projected back into intermediate areas. The fact that there is a high-cost attention task occurring during detection of peripheral stimuli in the test conditions does not rule out the possibility that a subsequent attentional backprojection occurs and gives rise to awareness of those stimuli. Second, there is considerable evidence that there are several different kinds of attention mechanisms in the brain (a point that I will revisit shortly). It is possible that the high-cost attention task exhausts just one kind of attention, leaving others untaxed and, hence, available to give rise to awareness of the periphery. Finally, Braun and Julesz interpret their own results in a way that supports the AIR theory. They suggest that visual pop-out follows a Global Competition process in which the visual system selects the most salient attributes and suppresses less salient attributes. They then suggest that this Global Competition might occur in inferotemporal cortex (Braun & Julesz, 1998, p. 20). This implies that processing in inferotemporal cortex, the locus of high-level vision, precedes visual awareness. That is precisely what the AIR theory claims. The only difference is that Braun and Julesz do not call the selection and suppression process an instance of attention. Though reluctant to engage in a verbal dispute, I am inclined to think that this is a paradigmatic case of what is generally described as an attentional process. If so, the Global Competition model coincides with the AIR theory. The second study that alleges to show awareness without attention uses a similar paradigm (Rock, Linnett, Grant, & Mack, 1992). Here, subjects are shown a series of cross-hair images in which they are asked to determine which of the two intersecting lines is longer. On one of these trials, an unexpected target stimulus is ashed in one corner of the image. The subjects are then asked whether they saw the target, and, if so, they are asked to describe it. Many of the subjects report seeing the stimulus, and they accurately identify its color and location, though not its shape. The authors conclude that an unexpected stimulus can enter awareness without attention. This conclusion is premature. As with the other experiment, it is perfectly possible that awareness of the peripheral stimulus comes after an attentional process involving Global Competition has taken place. The fact that subjects do not expect the stimulus to appear does not show that attention is not applied after the fact. It supports the possibility that awareness-conferring attention occurs after preprocessing. It must also be noted that 25% of the subjects tested using the paradigm did not perceive the surprise stimulus. There is a possibility that the other 75% were allocating

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some attention to the periphery. Using a very similar paradigm, More and Egeth (1997) found that only 010% of their subjects consciously recognized peripheral stimuli. So striking is this pattern that Mack and Rock (1998) have now written a book revising the claim in their original article and arguing that conscious perception cannot occur without attention. They have also corroborated a second tenet of the AIR theory, viz consciousness-conferring attention is allocated under the control of highlevel representations. To demonstrate this, they achieved a visual version of the cocktail party effect by quickly displaying words while subjects performed attention-consuming line comparison tasks. Subjects would see the word if it was their own name, but fail to see it otherwise. As with other cases we have seen, attention, and hence consciousness, seems to depend on prior interpretation. 2.4. Anatomical Bases It is natural to ask what parts of the brain underlie the attentional processes that bring intermediate-level representations into awareness. This question, it turns out, is quite difcult to answer. Attention, like many folk-psychological concepts, is a mongrel. When we analyze it, we nd that several different things fall under this label. For example, there is a kind of attention associated with vigilance as when we keep our focus on the same monotonous task, and another kind of attention associated with selection as when we pick out an object from a sea of distracters. These conceptually distinct forms of attention apparently have distinct neural correlates (see Posner & Raichle, 1994, for a review). Investigating the neural correlates of attention also leads to distinctions that are more nely grained than our various concepts of attention. For example, the notion of an object-based attention mechanism was introduced earlier in discussing neglect. This can be distinguished from a kind of spatial attention that focuses on the relative locations of entire objects rather than their parts. There is evidence that these are located in anatomically distinct regions of parietal cortex (Humphreys & Ridoch, 1994). Given this motley assortment of attention mechanisms, and others that I have not mentioned, one can rightfully wonder which contribute to awareness. I will not provide a denite answer to this question. I think it is an important topic for future research. I have implicated object-based attention, a scanning mechanism, and a Global Competition mechanism, all of which may or may not be independent. It is unlikely that only one kind of attention contributes to awareness. Brain lesions in different areas (e.g., posterior parietal, inferior parietal, and frontal cortex) can all give rise to different forms of neglect. Instead, I think there are a family of mechanisms that are united by their common ability to exploit high-level information in making intermediate-level states conscious. An adequate taxonomy of these, and an understanding of how they operate, still elude us. I have also said nothing about how neurons at the intermediate level become marked by these attentional processes. What makes the marked neurons different from other intermediate-level activities that do not enter awareness? How are they marked? This is also an important empirical question demanding further research. There are several distinct, but compatible, possibilities. One possibility is that the

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neurons that enter consciousness have a different ring pattern. A second possibility is that those neurons enter into a reentrant feedback relation with neurons in attention mechanisms. A third possibility is that they are endowed with a special kind of connectivity. In particular, they might become accessible to other regions of the brain, which gives them a privileged role in information processing. The last suggestion raises a possibility that has been of considerable interest to those studying the neural correlates of consciousness. Perhaps intermediate-level representations enter awareness when they broadcast to areas of prefrontal cortex that have been associated with working memory (Wilson, Scalaidhe, & Goldman-Rakic, 1993). A number of authors have argued that such connections to prefrontal cortex are essential to conscious experience. First, Nakamura and Mishkin (1986) have done primate ablation studies suggesting that removal of prefrontal cortex results in complete blindness. Second, Crick and Koch (1995) argue that conscious states must be connected to prefrontal areas, because prefrontal areas mediate rational action and verbal reporting, and conscious states contribute to both. Finally, Sharaie, Weiskrantz, Barbur, Simmons, Williams, and Brammer (1997) did fMRI studies that contrasted activity in the brain of a blindsighted subject during those conditions in which he does and does not experience phenomenal awareness in his blind eld. When he reported phenomenal experience, there was a signicant increase in visual areas of prefrontal cortex, notably area 46. Despite this evidence, I do not think the case for prefrontal involvement is terribly convincing. The last two arguments run the risk of mistaking cause for effect. Even if prefrontal activity always occurs when visual states become conscious (an unproven hypothesis), it does not show that projections to prefrontal activity are essential to consciousness. Conscious states might be accessible to prefrontal areas without being conscious in virtue of such accessibility (see Block, 1998 for another, related line of objection). The ablation work is more suggestive, but there is now some evidence that it is misleading. First, when more localized lesions are created in prefrontal area 46, which Sharaie et al. (1997) appeal to, monkeys only seem to lose their ability to preserve spatial memories during delayed matching tasks. Their actual vision seems to be unimpaired. More important, Gilman, Saunders, Rickrode, and Mishkin (1998) have recently reevaluated the Nakamura and Mishkin results by performing a similar experiment. After removing the frontal lobe portion in a Nakamura and Mishkin-style ablation, they found that monkeys continue to display visual discrimination and visually-guided action. The earlier results might have merely given the appearance of blindness by disrupting connections between the visual system and systems that mediate motor responses to visual stimuli. The new results suggest that monkeys might retain visual experience without interaction between visual areas and the relevant parts of the frontal lobe. If attention confers awareness by connecting intermediate-level representations to other brain systems, we might want to look elsewhere. The complete articulation of the AIR hypothesis will depend on the development of an adequate theory of attention. For now, the appeal to attention can only function as a placeholder. Evidence suggests that attention confers awareness; now we must gure out exactly what the relevant form of attention is and how it contributes. These promissory notes do not trivialize the AIR hypothesis, because the invocation of

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attention is already a substantive, testable, and controversial claim. One can, however, rene that claim by exploring the nature and neural basis of attention. 2.5. Other Modalities The AIR theory is intended as a theory of visual awareness. It has a structure, however, that might extend to other sensory modalities. Like vision, other modalities involve different levels of processing and are affected by attention. It is possible that awareness is associated with attended intermediate-level representations throughout the brain. Jackendoff (1997) takes his hypothesis about the privileged status of the intermediate level to extend beyond vision. I would like to leave this an open question for further research. It is worth noting, however, a couple of suggestive phenomena involving auditory language processing. The AIR theory says that visual recognition is attempted before the onset of visual awareness. This processing order is also evidenced in audition. When we listen to language, our comprehension of words can affect our experience of them. A notable example is the phenomenon of phoneme restoration. Listeners will often report hearing a phoneme that has been omitted from a spoken sentence. The phoneme they hear will be one that renders the word in which it occurs meaningful relative to its sentential context. For example, Warren (1970) asked subjects to listen to the following two sentences with an omitted phoneme. It was found that the _eel was on the axle. It was found that the _eel was on the orange. When they listened to the rst sentence, they heard the incomplete word as wheel, and when they listened to the second, they heard the incomplete word as peel. Thus, the experience of these words clearly depended on the way latter parts of the sentence were interpreted. Assuming that sentence interpretation occurs at an unconscious level of semantic processing, these examples demonstrate that our phonological experience of sentences occurs after they have been interpreted. This result accords well with the AIR theory if we follow Jackendoff in thinking of the phonological level as the intermediate stage of language processing. The intermediate level is the locale of awareness, but it only achieves that status after a higher level of processing. A second auditory phenomenon is the famous cocktail party effect. When we are focused on a nearby conversation, we lose conscious awareness of other conversations going on in the background. Those conversations pop back into awareness, however, if one of their participants mentions our name or uses some other salient word. The same phenomenon can be reproduced using dichotic listening paradigms, in which a different recording is played in each ear. Subjects will lose their awareness of one recording until a salient word occurs. Once again, it is natural to suppose that interpretation precedes awareness. When our unconscious semantic system recognizes that an unattended word might be signicant to us, it brings that word into phenomenal awareness. This has been classically interpreted as an attention phenomenon. Interpretation gives rise to phenomenology by directing attention to relevant stimuli. Such examples suggest that the AIR theory might be applicable in the auditory domain.

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3. PHILOSOPHICAL RAMIFICATIONS

3.1. Against HOT AIR Philosophers have proposed a number of theories of consciousness. Many of these have been informed by empirical, or at least introspective, evidence. At the same time, few have been erected around our knowledge of the brain. The AIR theory differs in that respect. It is a neurally informed theory of consciousness. If this theory is correct, it has a number of important philosophical consequences. For one thing, it is incompatible with a number of existing philosophical hypotheses. I cannot do justice to all of these hypotheses here, but I want to raise the specter of possible empirical disconrmation. One hypothesis that seems to be threatened by the AIR theory is the Higher-Order Thought (HOT) theory of consciousness eloquently advanced by Rosenthal (1986). According to that theory, states become conscious in virtue of being the intentional targets of higher-order thoughts. For example, I would become visually conscious of seeing a dog in virtue of having a thought that I would express by saying, Im seeing a dog. The HOT theory is similar to the AIR theory in that both think states can become conscious in virtue of activities at higher levels of processing. They also agree that interpretation precedes conscious experience. Despite these similarities, the AIR theory differs from the HOT theory in important respects. The high-level states that direct attention into intermediate levels are not HOTs. First, they are not higherorder states. A higher-order state is one that represents another state. High-level perceptual states fail to qualify because they do not represent intermediate-level states. Instead, they represent the distal objects that they are deployed to recognize. Moreover, the high-level states invoked by the AIR theory are not thoughts. Thoughts are presumably amodal propositional attitudes. They are the kinds of things that enter into reasoning and dispose us to make verbal reports. In contrast, the relevant highlevel states on the AIR theory are perceptual representations. Finally, the AIR theory says that intermediate-level states can become conscious even when we lack higherlevel states to interpret them. This is what happens when interpretation fails and we resort to attentional scanning. If AIR is right, HOT is not. 3.2. The Stalinesque Theater The next account I will mention is Dennetts (1991). Dennett criticizes other accounts for becoming ensnared in debates about whether consciousness arises from processes that are Stalinesque or Orwellian. Stalinesque accounts have it that information is edited or censored before becoming conscious. Orwellian accounts have it that we experience an unedited stream of information, which is subsequently revised and fed back into consciousness erasing memories of what came before. On his own multiple-drafts theory neither story is right. Both mistakenly believe there is some center of consciousness. So, they think there is a real question as to whether information gets into that center prior to or after processing. In actual fact, he claims, there is no center. There are multiple narratives going on simultaneously. The evidence marshaled in favor of the AIR theory tells against Dennetts account.

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On the AIR theory, there is something that qualies as a (somewhat distributed) center of consciousness, viz. intermediate-level processors. These are comprised of different component subprocessors, but they qualify as a center in Dennetts sense, because they are anatomically and functionally separable from other parts of the brain. In healthy brains they harbor a single, coherent narrative separated from competing drafts with the help of attention. I have also suggested that conscious processing is Stalinesque. Attention gives rise to awareness after information has been censored or modied by an interpretational level of processing. The turnstile that ushers information into consciousness is more complex than intuitions might dictate, because it involves high-level feedback. But, there seems to be a fact of the matter about when and under what conditions information enters awareness. If the AIR Theory is right, Dennetts claims cannot be sustained. 3.3. Sensing Perception This response to Dennett also exposes a problem for classic sense-data theories. Sense-data theorists traditionally assume that phenomenology precedes interpretation. When we see an object, we rst become phenomenally aware of sense-datum. This is the level of sensation. Perception occurs when the sense-datum is interpreted as representing something. In one respect, the AIR theory corroborates this kind of account. High-level vision delivers interpretations of intermediate-level representations, and intermediate-level representations are those of which we are phenomenally aware. On the other hand, the AIR theory puts interpretation before phenomenology. We become visually conscious of a stimulus after it has been identied, if identication takes place. We dont perceive our conscious sensations, as the sense-data theorists would have it. Instead, we sense our perceptions. In this respect, the sense-data theorists had it backward. 3.4. Gray Matters Philosophers have offered various solutions to the mindbody problem. Some say that phenomenal mental states are not identical to any states describable by existing physical science. Others say there is a type identity between phenomenal states and certain kind of brain states. Still others say that phenomenal states can be identied with functional roles, which are delineated in turn by the platitudes of folk psychology or by the discoveries of empirical psychology. The AIR theory falls into this last category, what Block (1978) calls Psychofunctionalism. It uses empirical science to correlate phenomenal states with a particular kind of functional role. That functional role can be stated in more or less computational terms by appealing to levels of information processing. But this functional organization is mirrored by the organization of the nervous system; functional components are anatomically distinct. The functional role of consciousness can be described using a high-level neural description. This can be regarded as a kind of Neurofunctionalism. Neurofunctionalism allows for a fairly straightforward correlation between mind and brain. It suggests that an account of the mind can be naturally accommodated within physical science. It also shows that the brain matters when studying the mind. Looking at the brain is one of the best ways to understand how cognition is function-

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ally organized. This insight is in stark contrast to early functionalists who appealed to computational roles in order to escape brain-based theories of experience (e.g., Putnam, 1960). Functionalists have been skeptical of brain science ever since, and those who take the brain seriously have been skeptical about functionalism (e.g., Block, 1978; Searle, 1980; Churchland, 1986). I think both sides are mistaken. Brainfriendly philosophers sometimes talk as if it is sufcient to correlate conscious states with brain states without talking about function. To say that phenomenology occurs when such and such part of the brain lights up is not satisfying from an explanatory perspective. To understand how the mental could be physical, we must recognize that mental states play certain functional roles and carry certain information. We can learn about these roles and how they are implemented by looking at the brain. Correlating mental states with neural states becomes illuminating when we can see a mutually enlightening correspondence between the functional organization of each. Systems-level neuroscience typically follows this stricture. It concerns itself with functional organization and develops theories of cognition by observing how the brain parcels out information-processing tasks. It is time to decimate the barriers between functionalists and fans of the brain. Even if it is wrong in its details, the AIR theory can be interpreted as a plea for this more egalitarian methodology.
4. CONCLUSION

I have developed a theory of visual consciousness by appealing to lessons from psychology and cognitive neuroscience. The theory states that consciousness occurs when intermediate-level visual processors are enhanced or scanned by attention mechanisms, which can operate under the direction of high-level visual processors. This theory is not necessitated by the evidence I have presented, but it offers one viable explanation. It also coincides, in part, with other empirically motivated theories of consciousness that appeal to intermediate-level representations (Jackendoff, 1987; Koch & Braun, 1996) or afford a central role to attention (Posner & Rothbart, 1992; Mack & Rock, 1998). If the AIR story is right, a number of philosophical hypotheses will be disconrmed. That possibility suggests a more general methodological moral. We should try to build our theories of consciousness around empirical evidence. Included in this effort will be a thorough examination of the neural correlates of conscious experience. Many philosophers nd the search for neural correlates to be little more than a parlor sport for scientists who fail to understand the relationship between mind and brain. This attitude is undermined by the discovery that a neurally informed theory can have signicant implications for claims that have been defended within philosophy.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Versions of this paper have been presented at the 1998 Society for Philosophy and Psychology Conference, in Minneapolis and the 1998 Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology Conference in New Orleans. Some of this material has also been presented at Washington University and at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. I thank my audiences, and express special gratitude to David Rosenthal, Georges Rey, Bill Bechtel, Murat Aydede, David Hilbert, Dan Gilman, Albert Yonas, and Michael Tye for some useful discussions.

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