Technical Report # 107

Attention, Automatism, Consciousness

Shiffrin, Richard M.

Abstract

A good part of my professional life has been spent exploring data and theory bearing on two related dichotomies: short-term memory/long-term memory, and attention/automatism. These dichotomies provide the two most obvious choices for the mapping of consciousness to concepts in cognition, but up to now I have largely refrained from discussing the possibility of such mappings. This chapter will focus on the latter of the two: the possible relation between attention and consciousness.