Inhibition of Return (IOR): Is it Consciousness of an Object without Attention or Attention without an Object and Consciousness?

Attention and consciousness are related but not identical: attention is sufficient but not necessary for consciousness, meaning one is conscious of everything attended but does not attend to everything conscious. Experimental evidence from blindsight research challenges this, showing visual attention can occur without visual awareness. This paper examines Inhibition of Return (IOR), a cognitive phenomenon, through micro-phenomenology to illustrate both positions. It also extends Christopher Mole's link between attention and agency by framing the discussion using Merleau-Ponty's concept of embodied pre-reflective intentionality.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The crux of the dispute on the mutual relations between attention and consciousness, and to which I have referred in this paper, lies in the question of what can be attended in spatial attention that obviously resonates with the phenomenological issue of intentionality (e.g., the noesis-noema structure). The discussion has been initiated by Christopher Mole. He began by calling for a commonsense psychology, according to which one is conscious of everything that one pays attention to, but one does not pay attention to all the things that one is conscious of. In other words, attention is supposed to be a condition which is sufficient but not necessary for consciousness, i.e., consciousness is a necessary concomitant of attention, but attention is not a necessary concomitant of consciousness. Mole seeks to validate his stance with data from psychology labs. His view is, however, partly confronted, for instance, by Robert Kentridge, Lee de-Wit and Charles Heywood, who used their experimental research on a neurological condition called blindsight as evidence of a dissociation between attention and consciousness, i.e., that visual attention is not a sufficient precondition for visual awareness. In this meta-theoretical state of affairs, I would like to focus on the cognitive phenomenon most often referred to as Inhibition of Return (IOR) and suggest that, following its micro dynamics from the perspective of micro-phenomenology, it can be used to actually showcase all of the options on both sides of the argument. One of my leading goals would be also to follow Mole’s attempt to link attention with agency but where we differ is that I wish to heuristically articulate the matter in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological notion of embodied pre-reflective intentionality.