The control of access to consciousness is inherently metacognitive. That is, it requires knowledge about our ownmental functioning, and about the material that is to be selected or rejected. Voluntary attention would seem to require conscious metacognition, or the ability to have conscious access to and control over the different things that can become conscious.  Metacognition is a major topic in its own right, one we can only touch on here. It is widely believed that knowledge of one's own performance is required for successful learning. Among students in school, good learners continually monitor their own progress; poor learners seem to avoid doing so, as if fearing that the results might be too awful to contemplate. But by avoiding conscious knowledge of results, they lose the ability to guide their own learning in the most effective way.  We have previously maintained that consciousness is involved especially in the learning of new things, those that demand more adaptation. If that is so, then attention (as metacognitive control of consciousness) seems to be necessary for voluntary, purposeful learning.  Many of the most important uses of consciousness are metacognitive. Normal access to Short Term Memory involves metacognitive control of retrieval, rehearsal, and report. Long Term Memory retrieval is equally metacognitive. One cannot know consciously why or how one did something in the past without metacognitive access. One cannot deliberately repeat an action by evoking its controlling goal image without metacognition, nor can one construct a reasonably accurate and acceptable self concept without extensive metacognitive operations. All these functions require sophisticated, and partly conscious, metacognitive access and control, which inevitably becomes a major theme of this book from here on. One of our main concerns in this chapter is the role of conscious metacognition in voluntary attention.  One cannot choose consciously between two alternative conscious topics without anticipating something about the alternatives. That is, one must represent to oneself what is to be gained by watching the football game on television rather than reading an interesting book.

Further, one must operate upon one's own system in order to implement that voluntary choice. These are all metacognitive operations. Later in this chapter we will propose that human beings have access to something analogous to a computer "directory" or a "menu," which we will call an Options Context. The Options Context makes consciously available whatever immediate choices there are to attend to in sensation, memory, muscular control, imagery, and the like. Voluntary control of attention then comes down to making a conscious decision about current options. Since Options Contexts are called through the global workspace, control of the global workspace also determines one's ability to control voluntary attention.               

Attention is directed by goals.                 

                    We suggest in this chapter that attention is always controlled by goals, whether voluntarily or not.  This is obvious in the case of voluntary attention: when we have the conscious, reportable goal of paying attention to the weather rather than to a good novel, we can usually do so. It is not so obvious for automatic attentional mechanisms, but the same case can be made there.  If one's own name breaks through to consciousness from an unattended stream of material, while a stranger's name will not, this suggests that significant stimuli can exercise some sort of priority; but significant events are of course those that engage current goals. Since there was in this case no conscious decision to pay attention, there must be unconscious mechanisms able to decide what is important enough to become conscious. One's own name must surely be associated with the higher levels of the goal hierarchy. Indeed, we have previously touched on the idea that significant input can be defined as information that reduces uncertainty in a goal context; there is thus an inherent relationship between significance and goals.  Therefore it seems likely that automatic attention is controlled by the goal hierarchy in such a way that more significant events tend to out-compete less significant ones. Automatic attentional mechanisms have been widely investigated, in general by training subjects to detect or retrieve some information; but of course training works by teaching subjects that some previously trivial event is now  a significant goal in the experiment  that is, in experimental training we always transmute the social and personal goals of the subject into experimental significance. A subject may come into the experiment intending to cooperate, to appear intelligent, to satisfy his or her curiosity, or to earn money; in the course of the experiment, this translates into a good faith effort to detect tones in auditory noise, or to spot faces in a crowd. Successful performance on this previously irrelevant task is now perceived to be a means to satisfy one's more personal goals. Thus whatever motivates the subject to participate now becomes the indirect goal of the experimental task as well. In this sense, significance is something we create by the very social conditions of an experiment. Any experiment that trains automatic attention is therefore involves a significant object of attention. Thus attention has to do with the assignment of access priority to potentially conscious events. Practicing voluntary attention to the point of automaticity is known to improve the chances of an event becoming conscious. But of course in the real world those events that we decide voluntarily to pay attention to most often, and which therefore become highly practiced, are precisely those that are significant. We practice more voluntary attention to the color of a traffic light than we do to the paint on the pole that holds up the light. Thus in the real world, significance and practice covary.                

Voluntary and automatic control of access to consciousness

                    We will argue in this chapter that voluntary control of attention may be quite flexible, in contrast to automatic attention, which is relatively rigid because unconscious and automatic processes are insensitive to context. While automatic attentional mechanisms seem to be controlled by the goal hierarchy, there is reason to think that  voluntary attention can operate at least for to a degree independently. Even the most compulsive dieter can voluntarily ignore, at least for a while, the presence of delicious, tempting food. But there is a trade off between habitual, goal guided control of attention, and voluntary attention. We now explore these issues in some detail.                

Voluntary attention: conscious control of access to consciousness
                               

                    According to the last chapter, volition comes down to ideomotor control. That is, it involves a momentary conscious goal image that serves to recruit unconscious processors needed to carry out the goal. Thus voluntary control requires consciousness, at least briefly. But attention, by the argument above, is the control of access to consciousness. It follows that voluntary attention is conscious control of access to consciousness. This may sound paradoxical, but it is not. We can be conscious of the next thing we want to be conscious of, and display a goal image to embody that intention. This goal image in turn can trigger unconscious processes able to fulfill the intention. An obvious everyday example is the intention to watch a news program on television. Once the goal of watching the news becomes conscious, the details of walking to the TV set and turning the channel knob may be mostly automatic. It can be done in a preoccupied state, for example. The conscious attentional goal image may be broadcast to many processors, for instance, eye movement nuclei in the brain stem. In the case of the program on television, once the goal of watching television becomes conscious, with no competing goal image or intention, our eyes and head will swivel in the right direction automatically.

Automatic attention: unconscious control of access to consciousness 

                               We already have proposed a simple mechanism whereby different unconscious events may access consciousness: namely, competition between input processors, guided by feedback From receiving processors. However, this kind competition is not guided by system goals. Access that is not sensitive to goals may not be harmful when there is no urgency and enough time to allow different elements to come consciousness to be evaluated for relevance. But random, impulsive access to consciousness becomes maladaptive when quick decisions are needed to survive or to gain some advantage. We would not want a stray thought to enter consciousness just when walking along the very edge of a cliff, or when making split second decisions to avoid a traffic accident.  We need some way in the GW model to connect automatic access control to the goal hierarchy; but we cannot afford to let existing goals control all input automatically, because some information whose significance is not yet known may become very important in the future. As usual, we face a trade off  between rapid, routine access, and flexible but slower access. The role of significance is not the only thing to be explained; another major factor is practice. There is a sizable research literature on attentional automatization with practice in perceptual.  We know, for example, that scanning a list for a well-practiced word will cause the target to "pop out" of the field. Evidently there are detection systems that present the target word to consciousness quite automatically, once they find it. Similarly, items that come to consciousness in automatic memory search have a compelling, unavoidable quality, suggesting that here too,  access control to consciousness has become automatic. The same may be said for the well-known Stroop phenomenon, in which the printed name of a color word like "brown" or "red" tends to drive out the act of naming the color of the word. In all these cases, access to consciousness has itself become automatic and involuntary, at least in part due to practice. We have previously developed arguments that automaticity can be quite rigid and inflexible, and this suggests that automatic control of attention, too, can be rigid and dysfunctional in new situations.        

               A simple word game can make the point. We can ask  someone to repeat "poke, poke, poke, ..." ten times, and then ask, "what do  you call the white of an egg?" Most people (even those who really know better) will answer "the yolk"  presumably the first word that comes to mind. Or we can ask a person to repeat "flop, flop, flop, ..." and ask,"What do you do at a green traffic light?" Again, most people tend to answer, "Stop" which is not correct. Even practicing the priming word five or ten times will set the system to bring rhymes to consciousness, as if conscious access control is at least momentarily controlled by rigid automatisms. Relying on automatic conscious availability is known to lead to errors in reasoning as well. Automatic attentional mechanisms must surely influence spontaneous thoughts and memories outside of the experimental setting as well. By comparison to the great research literature on voluntary recall there is only a small body of work on spontaneous memory,  though in the real world, spontaneous thoughts and memories are surely many times more common than deliberate acts of recall. These studies of thought monitoring indicate that the spontaneous flow of thought is highly sensitive to current personal significance, just as we would expect from the evidence discussed above.              

Model6A: Automatic attention is guided by goals                               

                Suppose that there are "attentional contexts"  goal contexts whose main purpose is to bring certain material to mind: to move the eyes and head, to search for words in memory and bring them to consciousness, etc.               

               We have previously suggested that all input, conscious and unconscious, may be processed automatically to identify it; but only conscious material is broadcast systemwide. If that is true, then attention does save processing effort, but not on the input side. If all input, conscious and unconscious, is processed enough to identify it, the savings occur only in the fact that unconscious material is not broadcast system wide, and therefore does not engage most of one's processing capacity.     

               We now suggest that unconscious material may either disrupt or shape the conscious stream, if the unconscious input interacts with the dominant context hierarchy that currently controls the attended stream. Disruption of the dominant context can occur if the unconscious input activates high levels of the goal hierarchy that are incompatible with current lower levels. If we are listening to a boring football game and someone calls our name, that may disrupt the dominant context hierarchy controlling the conscious stream, because our own name is more significant than the boring game. Alternatively, the unconscious input may remain unconscious but help to shape the conscious experience (e.g. MacKay, 1973 etc.). If the unconscious input is compatible with the dominant context hierarchy, , unconscious input may help to shape the conscious experience. In this way, the unconscious word "river" can bias the conscious interpretation of an ambiguous word like "bank" even though the unconscious word never becomes conscious. The GW approach therefore suggests a way of resolving the filter paradox for both of these experimentally demonstrated cases. The main point, again, is that automatic attention is evidently sensitive to the dominant context hierarchy, and particularly to dominant goals. Input that triggers a high level goal seems to receive higher access priority to consciousness.
                

The Options Context for conscious metacognition                               

               Thus far it seems that we can understand automatic attention without adding fundamentally new ideas. Voluntary attention will be somewhat more demanding.                In a computer one can find out the contents of any memory by calling up a "directory,"  a list of files that may be selected. Given the directory, one can choose one or another file of information, and engage in reasoning about the different options: one file may lack the desired information; another may have it in an awkward format; a third may be so long that the information will be hard to find, and so on. Seeing the directory permits one to engage in conscious reasoning about the options. But once a file is selected, its contents will dominate the viewing screen.  The exact same necessity and solution would seem useful in the nervous system. It would be nice to have rapid conscious access to the alternatives which one could pay attention to. Even a well known phenomenon such as Short Term Memory (STM) suggests that there is a such a "directory" or "menu" of readily available options. We can retrieve information from STM; we can rehearse it, using voluntary inner speech; or we can report its contents. People can do any or all of these separable functions on request. Clearly all them must be readily available. But how do we represent this fact in GW terms? We could say that certain specialists or contexts are highly active, ready to compete for access to consciousness. However, it seems more convenient to represent the options in a goal context of their own. Voluntary control of attention then comes down to ready conscious access to, and the ability to select, the choices defined within such an Options Context. Specialized processors could "vote" for the various options and the winning option could evoke the appropriate effectors and subgoals by ideomotor control. Thus we seem to have all the makings for a mental directory already at hand.                 

Model 6B: Voluntary attention allows conscious choice                             

               We have previously noted that voluntary attention must be sensitive to the goal hierarchy, but that it cannot be completely controlled by automatic goals. After all, we can consciously work to change our own goals and even the most habit driven person can for some time avoid paying attention to habitual conscious contents. This may be quite difficult at times, but if it were impossible, people would lose the ability to change their goals. Flexibility is indeed the only reason to have voluntary attention in the first place. Otherwise automatic attentional control would be quite sufficient.           

                               Inherent in the global workspace, of course, is the notion that multiple sources of information can interact to create new responses to new conditions. Goal contexts can still influence the choice, and indeed, different parts of the goal hierarchy may support different conscious contents. From this point of view, conscious choices may cause the goal hierarchy to decompose; previously cooperating goal contexts may now compete in support of different options. This is indeed the definition of a dilemma being caught between one deep goal and another. This is of course the stuff of human tragedy, on stage and off.  Conscious inner speech may be very important in maintaining voluntary attentional control when it runs counter to automatic tendencies. We have already mentioned the evidence from clinical work with children who have impulse control problems, showing that teaching them to speak to themselves is helpful in maintaining control. On a short term basis,  voluntary inner speech, and voluntarily retrieved mental images, may also be helpful to fight off automatic attentional tendencies. In the model, conscious availability of recent thoughts  "Do your homework, don't think about playing outside!" may help to control the automatic tendencies, at least for a while. Thus recency may be used to combat automaticity. But a permanent victory for the voluntary control presumably requires the creation of a new, coherent context, within which the automatic choices are differently defined.                     

Automatizing voluntary attention                              

               Experimental studies of trained perceptual access may mimic the way in which  normal attentional mechanisms become automatic. In a typical experiment, subjects are asked to pay attention voluntarily to something they would normally ignore.  Subjects come into the experiment of course with their own goals, from earning money to impressing the experimenter. In order to achieve these goals, they are asked to do something that was previously quite irrelevant to them. Searching for a conscious stimulus a famous face in a picture of a crowd, for example is given very high priority by the experimental instructions. The instructions say, in effect, that in order for the subject to perform satisfactorily, he or she must pay attention to the face in the crowd. The task is repeated over and over again until it becomes automatic that is, until the alternatives in the voluntary options contexts for the task are reduced to one.  If we can generalize from this situation, there are apparently two necessary conditions for creating automatic access to consciousness:                

                               1. A target that has low priority for access  is given high

                               priority by a temporary, consciously available goal

                               context, which may be associated with high

                               levels  of the permanent goal hierarchy. E.g. social

                               compliance in an experiment.

                               2. Voluntary attention to the target is practiced until the

                               options context has no more degrees of freedom, so

                               that it changes into a single goal context.

               Presumably one's own name acquires associations early in life with high priority goals, such as one's desire for attention, for protection and care, for food, for avoiding punishment. And surely paying voluntary attention to one's name occurs many thousands of times. Hence, presumably, the Moray phenomenon of the subject's name breaking through to consciousness by virtue of automatic access control.    

               We can now consider two important cases of attentional control, directing attention toward something versus directing it away from something. The first is obviously important, and the second raises the classical psychodynamic issues of suppression and repression, which can be easily modeled in GW theory.                   

Directing attention toward something 

               Suppose we feel hungry, and have some conscious image of delicious food. Inherently, this image, we have argued, recruits processors able to help achieve the goal, and these must include attentional processors. If we are able to reach for food automatically, little attentional control would seem to be required. But if we must think about how to reach the desired food, to deal with obstacles, or to make choices about equally attractive alternatives, the goal image should be able to recruit access of these issues to consciousness. Thus, given an interesting conscious goal image, recruitment of attention should happen automatically along with recruitment of other subgoals to the goal. Thus the simplest case of directed attention toward something involves one goal image recruiting automatic eye movements, attentional search, etc., in order to bring up a conscious content.               

Using voluntary attention to create new access priorities              

               One way to make an unimportant stimulus important is to associate it explicitly with one's major goals. This is indeed what one does in conditioning. Pavlov's dog is typically deprived of food for a day or so, so that eating is high in the goal hierarchy. Through paired repetition, the famous bell then becomes a signal for food, so that it functions as a conscious event that engages the eating goal. Similarly, in operant conditioning, the act of wiggling one's tail may become a subgoal, after which, magically, food appears in the Skinner Box. While one must be cautious in anthropomorphizing animal experience, surely the experience of humans in such a situation is easy to guess: it always involves explicit, conscious association of the conditioned event with a re existing, significant goal. "Aha! so pushing this button always gives the right answer." Nor is conscious association of new events with existing high level goals limited to the laboratory. One extremely common persuasive technique used  by all politicians and advertisers is to associate a previously irrelevant event with a major life goal of the audience. Underarm deodorant was not very important before millions of people were consciously reminded that it is a sine qua non of social acceptability. For our purpose, this suggests two  critical points: one,  that the event to be connected to the significant goal must be conscious; and two, that this event can then come to control attentional mechanisms that control access of the previously irrelevant event to consciousness.              

Mental effort due to competition between voluntary and automatic attention

               We have defined "mental effort" as voluntary control against unexpected resistance. One obvious example involves trying to control one's attention voluntarily against contrary automatic  tendencies. Every child knows how it feels to have homework when s/he really wants to go outside and play. The process here presumably involves decision making, except that the decision is not in the first instance about doing something --- it is about paying attention to  something. That is, it is a struggle whose first outcome is purely mental. The act of paying attention to homework is more novel and effortful and less pleasant, and hence requires more conscious involvement, than the routine and pleasant act of thinking about playing. But once the issue is decided, one may become absorbed in the chosen path --- which is itself controlled by unconscious contexts, naturally. Then the experience of struggle and effort may utterly disappear, even for tasks that were initially seen as onerous and boring. Absorption is typically experienced as positive, perhaps because we simply do not monitor our experiences when we are truly absorbed. Or perhaps absorption is inherently pleasant as well. This kind of mental effort is a struggle between voluntary and automatic attention. Presumably the conscious goal images of having to do homework serve to recruit additional processors and contexts which may be able to "outvote" the automatic attentional systems promising fun and adventure by playing outside. This voluntary decision may have to be repeated a number of times at natural choice-points in the task. After taking a break from doing homework, the same struggle may have to be repeated. At each decision point, the intention to think about playing outside will tend to come up automatically, while the intention to continue with homework will have to be raised voluntarily, perhaps with the aid of a powerful motivating goal image or inner speech reminder. Obviously some of the recruited voting systems may be more significant than others. If some deep goal context is recruited to support homework --- such as the promise of quick approval by a loving parent, or the threat of ridicule by an older sibling --- the relevant deeper goal contexts can move the vote in one direction or another. During the decision struggle, conscious thoughts related to these deeper goals may aid one or the other side in the process.            

                    We can see this struggle for control especially in vigilance tasks, in which people are asked to monitor a blip on a radar screen, or some other minor perceptual event in an otherwise boring situation. Attentional control drops quite rapidly under these circumstances. But variation in attentional focus is quite normal even in interesting tasks. In all of these cases, one may enter a period of conflict between voluntary tendencies to continue attending with high efficiency, and the spontaneous or automatically controlled tendency to attend less well.      

The importance of accurate source attribution                

               For effective metacognitive control, we should be able to refer to previous or future events with accuracy. If we decide to repeat something we just learned we should be able to retrieve the relevant goal image and guiding goal context. Similarly, if we are to answer questions about our own thoughts, we must be able to refer to them. Accurate source attribution knowing why and how we did what we did seems vital for these tasks. And yet, we know that source attribution fails in a number of important cases. That is, much of the time we lose track of why and  how we did what we did, so that it becomes difficult to report these things accurately.       

               We have discussed the Langer & Imber study, in which automaticity in a task undermined the ability of people to report the features of the task, and made them more vulnerable to a misleading attribution about the task. In terms of the model, we can simply see how a voluntary options context is reduced to a single option (that is, just a single goal context). Further, goal images should become more fleeting over time if they are predictable. In either case, it should become much more difficult to retrieve the way in which one performed the task.                 

Directing attention away from something: Suppression,  repression, and emotional conflict
                

                    Although there is unresolved controversy in the scientific literature about the existence of  repression, there is no real doubt about the existence of some sort of tendentious evasion of conscious contents. Even the most skeptical observers acknowledge that people tend to make self serving errors and interpretations whenever there is enough ambiguity to permit this. The scientific arguments seem to revolve around the issue of repression, defined as îunconsciousï inhibition of troubling conscious contents. This is of course a terribly contentious issue, because we do not currently have good scientific tools for assessing these "zero point" issues. It is very difficult to tell with certainty whether someone really knew, even momentarily, that a thought was sufficiently threatening to avoid. But the fact of avoidance, and even some of the mechanisms of avoidance, are not really in question. How can we possibly avoid thinking of some topic if the decision to avoid it is itself conscious? Children play a game in which the participants try to avoid thinking about pink elephants, and of course they cannot do so. There is a contradiction between having the guiding goal image "pink elephants" and the trying to avoid it at the same time.

Similarly, in clinical hypnosis there is extensive lore suggesting that subjects should not be given negative suggestions. To help someone to stop smoking it is not helpful to say, "You will stop thinking of cigarettes," because the suggestion itself contains the thought of cigarettes. Thus directing attention away from something seems to be quite different from directing it toward something.                   

Thought avoidance can occur in many ways                

                    The "pink elephant" game cited above should not be taken to suggest that people simply cannot avoid conscious thoughts in a purposeful way. There is very good evidence for the effectiveness of thought avoidance, both in normal and clinical experiments.  Several mechanisms may serve to exclude information from consciousness. These range from changes in receptor orientation, as in evasive eye movements, to deliberate failure to rehearse items in short term memory in order to forget them, or tendentious re-interpretation of experiences and memories. "Directed forgetting" is one example. People in a short term memory experiment are simply told to forget certain items, and they will do so quite well. They probably rehearse only what they need to remember, and the to be forgotten  items fall by the wayside. That is, one can use the limited capacity of short term memory to load one topic in order to avoid another. This is indeed the principle of distraction: every human being must engage in some distraction sometimes to avoid pain, or boredom, or difficulty. In these cases there is no doubt about the existence of conscious thought avoidance.  

                    In general, we can distinguish between structural and momentary evasions. A religious belief system may help the believer escape anxiety about death and disease. After all, almost all religions provide reassurance about these things. Once a reassuring belief system is accepted and not challenged it creates a conceptual context for the believers' experience; thus certain anxious thoughts presumably will come to mind much less often. There are obviously also momentary evasions, such as not looking at beggars on the street, avoiding the gaze of dominant or frightening persons, and avoiding recall cues for unwanted memories. In principle any of these mechanisms can come under purposeful control, either voluntary or involuntary.  
                

When we lose voluntary access to avoided thoughts, there is the appearance of repression

                    In fact, the clinical evidence for  repression is just apparently purposeful but disavowed failure in voluntary access to normally conscious events. If we fail to recall some painful event that happened just yesterday, even though we remember everything else; or if we cannot remember a thought that  challenged a fundamental belief; or if we fail to make an obvious inference that seems obvious but is or painful to contemplate; any cases like this are likely to be interpreted as repression clinically.  One classical example is the "belle indifference" of the conversion hysteric, who may be suffering from psychogenic blindness, local anesthesia, or paralysis, but who may deny that this is much of a problem.  Thus the key is failure of voluntary, metacognitive access. (Involuntary measures of memory may not show any decrement: we know that recognition, skill learning, and savings in recall may survive failures of voluntary recall.                

Signal anxiety as ideomotor control of thought avoidance                              

                    There is a very interesting connection between these ideas and the  sychodynamic notion of "anxiety as a signal." GW theory suggest that people may have fleeting quasi-conscious goal images that may serve to mobilize attentional mechanisms for avoidance of certain conscious contents. This is precisely the role of signal anxiety. While the notion of signal anxiety may sometimes apply to clearly conscious feelings, some sources suggest that people can have very fleeting images that serve as warnings to avoid certain upsetting thoughts. Thus Freud is quoted as writing that thinking must aim "at restricting the development of affect in thought-activity to the minimum required for acting as a signal" (Freud, 1915/1959). In discussing the appearance of "substitutive ideas" in phobia, i.e. ideas that may evoke less fear than the original phobic object, Freud writes that "Excitation ... give(s) rise to a slight development of anxiety; and this is now used as a signal to inhibit ... the further progress of the development of anxiety." Here is another point of theoretical contact. Note that one the same ideas play a role in behavior-modification theory of phobia. For example, one can have a hierarchy of increasingly upsetting mental images about fire. A fire phobic may be able to have the thought of a book of matches with little fear, but the thought of a bonfire may be quite frightening. The image of a matchbook may then act as a safe goal image, which may trigger avoidance mechanisms that help the person to stay away from the really troubling mental images.                

Absorption and suspension of disbelief                

                    Conscious metacognition should of course  compete with other limited-capacity events, including the conscious content that is being controlled attentionally. We cannot read this book and at the same time entertain the conscious possibility of doing other things. It follows that absorption in a stream of events, such as movie or piece of music, should decrease access to metacognitive options. One common observation is that when we become absorbed in a film or novel, we can easily identify with the main characters. In the parlance of the theater, we "suspend disbelief". If disbelief is a conscious disputing of previous conscious contents, this is easy to model in GW theory. We need only suppose that disbelief requires an options context of the form, "Is what I just experienced really true or acceptable?" In deeply absorbed states accessing these conscious options may be competed out of consciousness.  Suspension of disbelief then presumably liberates our tendencies to identify with attractive fictional models, free from inhibition and contradiction. We can allow ourselves for a while to live in wishful fantasy. 

Hypnosis may decrease access to options contexts 

                    Chapter Seven suggested that hypnosis is reducible to absorbed ideomotor control. If that is true, and if absorption implies a decrease of access to attentional options, then we may be able to explain the extraordinary compliance of hypnotic subjects. We may suggest that self other differentiation often requires a momentary conscious decision: "Did I really want that, or was I persuaded by advertising to want that?" "Did the hypnotist tell me to raise my arm, or did I tell myself to do so?" Compliance in high hypnotizable subjects may therefore follow from their capacity to be deeply absorbed in the hypnotic situation, to the point where no conscious capacity is available to reflect on the situation from an outside perspective. Previously we were able to account for several other features of hypnosis, but not the remarkable compliance with suggestion, and the lack of resistance of unusual suggestion. We can now fill in this gap.                  

The role of attention in motivation and the maintenance of mental stability   

                               There are thousands of experiments focused on "perceptual defense," the apparent tendency of people to avoid reporting rapidly flashed words that are obscene or conflictful. However, these experiments apparently showed two opposite tendencies. People sometimes underreported taboo words ("perceptual defense") and sometimes overreported them compared to control words ("perceptual sensitization"). This seemed to be a paradox, which led to considerable criticism and disillusionment. However, the coexistence of "defense" and "sensitization" may not be just an experimental difficulty, but a fundamental fact about human allocation of attention. After all, we must do two things when presented with something painful, alarming, or ego threatening: first, we must know that it is there, so that we can cope with it; second, if possible we try to avoid it. If the event is novel, we presumably need conscious involvement in order to identify it and to learn to avoid it. Thus the existence of both sensitization and avoidance is something one might predict on an a priori basis.  This suggests that attention may have two major functions:               

                    (1) Allocation of conscious involvement to significant events and problems, by making them conscious in proportion to their motivational significance; this includes painful, alarming, or ego threatening events. Some examples include the resistance

of significant stimuli to habituation; the ability of one's own name to interrupt ongoing streams of conscious events; and our tendency to pay more attention to problems that demand more novel solutions.  This role of attention may be countered by another function, which is,

                   (2) Regulating the flow of novel information, so that we do not confront either too much, or the wrong kind of  novelty. We can think of this as protecting the context hierarchy from too-rapid change. Thoughts that threaten the stability of one's beliefs are avoided by most people.  Notice that in the case of painful sources of information, these two tendencies will run counter to each other: on the one hand, pain or threat is important, and therefore deserves attention; on the other, it is may demand such a fundamental change in the context hierarchy that it is rather avoided. It is possible that psychodynamic though avoidance result From this second role of attention. Excessive novelty, especial emotionally charged novelty, may threaten a fundamental realignment of the goal hierarchy.           

Some further thoughts about the operational definition of conscious experience              

                    It is suggested an operational definition for conscious experience, one that we have tried to adhere to quite faithfully. Namely, we were going to consider something a conscious experience if it could be reported accurately, and was claimed by the subject to be conscious. Early in the theoretical development we could not model this phenomenon of accurate retrospective report, of course, because it is actually quite complicated. It involves

                    --- consciousness of an event

                    --- retrospective ability to direct conscious recall       

               voluntarily to the event

                    --- the ability to recode the event in words or gestures

                    --- the ability voluntarily to carry out those words or    

                               gestures.                

                    In brief, in order to model the operational definition we first needed a usable conception of consciousness, volition, and attentional access. We had to "bootstrap" upward from the operational definition, until eventually we could hazard a true theoretical account. Ultimately, of course, every theory must explain its own operational definitions. Are we ready to do so now?             

                              Notice that initially, there is merely a conscious experience of a banana. Numerous systems adapt to this conscious event, including systems able to re-present a later image of the conscious event, voluntarily, on cue, in the context provided by a goal system that is instantiated by the experimental instructions. This goal system, when it is triggered by the question, "What did you just experience?" acts to guide a search for a plausible answer. Norman have pointed out that finding a plausible answer to any question, such as "What was George Washington's telephone number" requires a complex and sophisticated search, one that we would framew within a goal context. Similarly, a subject who has been instructed to look at a television screen and perceives a banana, must know that the correct answer is "banana" and not "television screen". So there is a large interpretive component in answering this question. Once it is interpreted properly, it is reasonable to think that one can voluntarily attempt to recall recent events, decide which ones could be meant by the questioner, retrieve it as an image, redisplay it consciously, and allow unconscious verbal systems to search for a lexical match: "a banana." Again, it takes a voluntary act to carry out the verbal report, which involves by the arguments of a momentary conscious goal image of the distinctive aspects of the action (perhaps the word "banana" in inner speech), the goal image is rapidly inspected by numerous systems able to check its propriety, and barring contrary images or intentions, it executes. Complex? Certainly, yes. But probably not too complex in the face of  psychological reality. It is quite satisfying to be able to give a plausible descriptive account of one's operational definition, after seven or eight chapters of hard work. It suggests again that we are on the right track. 

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