Awareness

Forms

External and internal

Many forms of awareness are discussed in the academic literature, often distinguished by the types of content they present. External awareness, or exteroception, is awareness of one's environment. It is primarily tied to the five senses, which are different modes of perceiving things outside oneself: seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. Impressions from these sensory modes are typically integrated into a unified awareness of the objects and events around oneself and their relative spatial locations. External awareness helps individuals gather information about the world, respond to changes in their surroundings, and navigate their environment. Direct and indirect realists debate whether the contents of external awareness are material objects themselves or representations mediating between perceiver and objects, such as sense data.

Inner awareness encompasses one's own body and mental states. Like external awareness, bodily awareness is multimodal, involving diverse senses and elements. They include proprioception associated with the position and movement of one's limbs and other body parts; the vestibular sense covering balance, orientation, and self-location; interoception concerning internal physiological states such as hunger, thirst, breathing, heartbeat, and temperature; pain; tactile sensations; and a sense of bodily ownership and ability to act. Bodily awareness allows individuals to monitor their internal states, regulate physiological needs, and coordinate their movements. An influential classification divides these elements into two categories: bodily sensations, which affect specific regions of the body, such as pain in a foot and an itch behind an ear; and bodily feelings, which are experienced as diffuse states not confined to particular body parts, such as thirst and fatigue. Another taxonomy contrasts high-level body awareness, which involves conceptual or emotional representations of the body, with low-level body awareness, which involves more immediate sensorimotor information often directly relevant to action.

Another type of inner awareness concerns knowledge of one's own mental states, including thoughts, memories, beliefs, emotions, desires, intentions, and mental images. Introspection is the process of examining one's mental states, as when a person recognizes that they are imagining a specific scenario, entertaining a particular thought, or feeling anxious about the outcome of an event. Understood in a broad sense, introspection covers all forms of inner awareness of the mind. Understood more narrowly, it is an explicit or reflective form of inner awareness in which a person deliberately attends to psychological events, in contrast to pre-reflective forms of inner awareness, which occur without introspection.

Both external and inner awareness are sources of knowledge. Academic debates assess and compare their reliability. External awareness can present false information in the form of illusions, as in the Müller-Lyer illusion, in which one line appears longer than another although both have the same length. A traditionally influential view holds that many forms of inner awareness are immune to error, for instance, that it is impossible to be aware of pain without being in pain. This view has been challenged in the contemporary discourse. One suggested counterexample is that a person may mistake a sensation of coldness for pain, leading them to believe that they are in pain when they are not. A more limited proposal restricts the immunity to a specific type of error: error through misidentification. This view holds that a person cannot be wrong about whether they, rather than someone else, are undergoing the experience. Such errors are possible in external awareness. For example, when a person in an accident sees a broken arm, they may falsely assume that it is their own arm.

Self

Understood in one sense, self-awareness is the same as inner awareness, covering all awareness of one's bodily and mental states. In another sense, it involves recognizing oneself as the object of awareness. This implies that one is aware of oneself as oneself, meaning that the content is not only something that belongs to the self but is at the same time recognized as such. For example, looking at an old photograph of oneself is self-awareness if one recognizes oneself but not if one mistakes the depicted person for a stranger. In this sense, self-awareness is not limited to private aspects, such as personal feelings, but also encompasses awareness of public features, such as one's physical appearance and mannerisms. Self-awareness can include a temporal dimension, in which a person sees themselves as an entity that persists through time; a social dimension, involving awareness of how one is viewed by others; a narrative dimension, concerning awareness of oneself as an enduring character in stories constructed by oneself and others; and an evaluative dimension, in which a person assesses themselves and their behavior against standards and ideals.

Some philosophers hold that all conscious awareness involves pre-reflective self-awareness: an implicit consciousness of oneself as the subject of experience without the self becoming an explicit content of that experience. Pre-reflective self-awareness in this sense contrasts with reflective introspection in which the self becomes an object of attention. It is controversial whether some form of self-awareness is present in every experience. Suggested counterexamples of selfless experiences include states of drug-induced ego dissolution through psychoactive substances, flow experiences involving undivided attention to a task, and being fully absorbed in a captivating movie.

Another debate concerns the definition and nature of the self, for instance, whether it is an object distinct from the environment, a specific mental faculty, a conscious observer of changing experiences, or a shifting collection of mental processes without a permanent essence. Views about the self can influence how self-awareness is understood. For example, David Hume challenged the existence of certain forms of self-awareness, arguing that there is no distinctive experience of a self. He held that instead of a persistent self, there is only a successive bundle of experiences forming a stream of consciousness.

Meta

Meta-awareness is awareness of awareness. It is a form of metacognition that involves explicit knowledge of what one is thinking, feeling, or perceiving. During episodes of meta-awareness, experience turns back on itself and takes note of its contents. For example, a student may recognize that instead of reviewing their lecture notes as intended, they have spent the past few minutes imagining weekend plans. The episode of mind-wandering was a form of awareness without explicit self-monitoring since the student had no meta-awareness that their attention had drifted. Some forms of mind-wandering may include meta-awareness, which is reflected in the contrast between tuning out and zoning out: a person may intentionally decide to tune out from an ongoing task while remaining meta-aware, whereas unintentional episodes of zoning out are forms of mind-wandering without meta-awareness.

A key function of meta-awareness is to monitor and regulate ongoing mental processes. It can help individuals detect and address problems in other cognitive activities. For instance, meta-awareness can help the student whose mind has wandered to refocus attention on reviewing lecture notes. Meta-awareness is also relevant to certain meditative practices that cultivate the ability to engage in nonjudgmental observation of mental events, such as mindfulness.

Nonhuman

The study of awareness is not limited to humans and also addresses animal awareness. Animals typically detect and respond to features of their environment, suggesting a basic form of awareness of their surroundings. A key question is whether these forms of animal intelligence involve or indicate conscious awareness. Common sense often assumes that at least some species, such as dogs and cats, are conscious. However, scientifically determining whether a particular species is conscious is difficult because consciousness cannot be directly observed. Instead, research has to use indirect behavioral and physiological evidence, such as flexible and goal-directed behavior, learning from experience, responses to pain and injury, the expression of emotions, and brain complexity. Researchers often rely on comparisons to humans, such as similarities between how humans and animals behave, express feelings, show patterns of neural activity, and have evolved.

Two research questions are whether animals of a particular species have conscious awareness at all, and if so, what their experiences are like. Traditional research has sometimes assumed that humans are exceptional and have a higher or more elaborate form of consciousness. Contemporary discussions have questioned this assumption and tend to focus more on how consciousness may vary across species along different dimensions. This approach may construct experiential profiles for distinct species without attempting to combine the different dimensions into a single scale of consciousness. Some researchers also consider the possibility of conscious awareness in plants.

The question of animal awareness plays a key role in animal ethics, particularly in discussions of the moral status and appropriate treatment of animals. For example, the existence of animal consciousness is relevant to debates about the negative effects of factory farming on animal well-being.

Another research topic concerns the problem of artificial awareness as a potential capacity of artificial intelligence. Computers can simulate certain functions of human awareness—such as perception, reasoning, language use, and learning—and perform computations that replicate some cognitive processes underlying these phenomena. However, it is controversial whether such simulations can produce conscious awareness. The school of functionalism holds that mental phenomena are defined by the functions they perform. This view leaves open the possibility of consciousness in computational systems that perform the functions associated with subjective experience. Research on artificial consciousness faces methodological problems similar to those in the study of animal consciousness, such as the difficulty of relying on indirect evidence to judge whether subjective consciousness is present. Another line of research focuses on information processing rather than subjective consciousness. It studies computational awareness as the capacity to detect and analyze information relevant to a situation and use it in automated decision-making.

Others

The contrast between focal and peripheral awareness concerns the structure of awareness. Focal awareness encompasses contents at the center of attention that are processed and experienced in greater detail. These contents typically relate to a task the individual is engaged in or are considered important in another way. Peripheral awareness involves contents outside the center of attention. The individual remains sensitive to those contents and may respond to unexpected changes, but processes them in less detail and dedicates more cognitive resources to the contents of focal awareness. For example, when a person's focal awareness is directed toward a text they are reading, they usually remain peripherally aware of their surroundings and certain objects in their vicinity. Similarly, when a person's auditory attention is captured by a guitar solo, they are typically still peripherally aware of other instruments that accompany the guitar.

Some theorists use the term awareness in a narrow sense to refer only to conscious awareness, which involves subjective experience. Understood in a broader sense, the term also encompasses unconscious or nonconscious awareness, in which individuals are aware of information without subjectively experiencing it. This can take the form of automatic cognitive processes that monitor external and internal events and use this information to influence behavior without conscious experience of those events. For instance, subliminal perceptions involve sensory stimuli that do not reach conscious awareness because they are too brief or not intense enough. These stimuli are nonetheless processed by the brain and can influence subsequent behavior. Another example concerns people with blindsight who report no visual experience of an object in front of them but can nonetheless accurately guess its location or features. Covert awareness is a phenomenon found in some patients in a vegetative state who appear unconscious to observers. They are externally unresponsive, but scans of their brain activity indicate that they can still follow commands, such as instructions to imagine playing tennis or moving from one room to another in their home. Altered states of awareness are forms of consciousness that differ qualitatively from the normal waking state. They include dreams, delirium, drug-induced hallucinations, and spiritual experiences.

Another distinction is between direct and propositional awareness. Direct awareness concerns a particular entity that is directly presented as an object of awareness. Propositional awareness concerns not a particular entity but a proposition or state of affairs, which can involve the properties of or relations between entities. For example, if one hears the doorbell and infers that a guest has arrived then this is propositional awareness of the guest's arrival. When the host opens the door and sees the guest, they have direct awareness of the guest. A key difference is that propositional awareness depends on how one thinks about and conceptualizes the entities involved, whereas direct awareness does not.

Several forms of awareness are involved in agency as individuals formulate action plans, anticipate outcomes, make decisions, and carry out their intentions. For example, awareness of what one is doing is often treated as an essential component of intentional action. This awareness is closely related to the sense of agency in which a person experiences themselves as the one who causes and controls the action. This distinguishes intentional actions from involuntary movements not guided by a conscious plan, such as the contrast between intentionally lifting one's right arm and the arm being raised externally by someone else. Conscious awareness is typically limited to certain aspects of an action, such as the movement one intends to perform, while diverse background processes coordinating the muscle activity and sensory feedback remain unconscious. Awareness of the reasons and values that motivate an action may influence the extent to which a person is morally responsible for performing this action.

Mindfulness is a form of awareness that plays a central role in various spiritual traditions, particularly in Buddhism. It is a nonjudgmental awareness focused on the bodily sensations, emotions, and thoughts one is currently having. It responds to mind-wandering by refocusing attention back to the present. Mindfulness involves observation of the contents of awareness without immediately trying to control or change them. The goal of practicing mindfulness is often to cultivate a form of equanimity while reducing the mind's tendency to get distracted and ruminate.

Various topic-specific forms of awareness are examined in the academic literature. Social awareness is knowledge of social situations, either about what other people are doing or more generally about social roles, positions, responsibilities, and group processes. It is closely related to group awareness, which encompasses knowledge of social information about a group and its members. Cultural awareness is a sensitivity to how culture shapes behavior in oneself and others. It includes knowledge of the beliefs, perceptions, and values common in different cultures, including one's own. Situational awareness is an understanding of one's environment and the elements within it. Other topic-specific types include security awareness, legal awareness, and suicide awareness.

Measurement

Researchers use several methods to study awareness. A key obstacle to measurement is that awareness cannot be directly observed from a third-person perspective, forcing researchers to rely on indirect evidence. The different methods can be divided into subjective and objective approaches. Subjective measures ask individuals to use introspection to report and describe the contents of their awareness. For example, an individual may be presented with a stimulus and then asked whether they were aware of it and what features they experienced. The assessment can also include questions about the confidence level to distinguish clear awareness from vague impressions. For instance, the individual may be asked to wager a bet to indicate how certain they are that a stimulus was present.

The Perceptual Awareness Scale is an influential subjective measure of awareness. It asks individuals to rate their experience on a scale of four levels: no experience, brief glimpse, almost clear, and clear. A key motivation for this approach is to allow individuals to report vague contents without exact knowledge of what was experienced, distinguishing faint impressions as a form of awareness from the absence of awareness.

Objective measures infer awareness from observable behavior or physiological signals. One approach relies on task performance, such as forced-choice discrimination. For example, an individual may be presented with a stimulus needed to solve a problem or choose a correct answer. If their performance is better than chance would predict, this is interpreted as an indication that the individual was aware of the stimulus. Another objective measure uses neuroimaging, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, to analyze brain activity and identify neural patterns associated with awareness. This method is available even for individuals who cannot communicate their experience. For example, brain scans of individuals in a vegetative state may reveal brain activity associated with awareness despite their inability to respond to their surroundings. Some research methods are tailored to specific forms of awareness. For example, the mirror test is a method to assess self-awareness in animals: the ability of an animal to respond to a mark on its body only visible in a mirror is often interpreted as evidence that the animal recognizes itself.

Both subjective and objective measures have limitations. Subjective measures are more direct indicators of awareness by reflecting how people experience its contents. However, reports of awareness are not always accurate: individuals may fail to report vague impressions, may have forgotten an experience by the time they are asked, or may confabulate non-existent contents of awareness to explain their behavior after the fact. Another obstacle is the observer paradox: monitoring a cognitive process can influence this process, meaning that the experienced contents may be different from the contents that would have been present without the monitoring.

A central challenge for objective measures is that the factors they track are not necessarily correlated with awareness. For example, performance above chance level may be caused by cognitive processes outside conscious awareness, while performance at chance level can happen despite awareness if an individual fails to use the relevant information. Similarly, when brain scans reveal neural patterns resembling those observed during conscious awareness, this evidence does not definitively establish that the person is aware. Some studies combine subjective and objective measures in a complementary approach, for example, by comparing performance with self-reported awareness.

Neuroscience

Neural systems that regulate attention serve to attenuate awareness among complex animals whose central and peripheral nervous systems provide more information than cognitive areas of the brain can assimilate. Within an attenuated system of awareness, a mind might be aware of much more than is being contemplated in a focused extended consciousness.

Basic awareness

Basic awareness of one's internal and external world depends on the brain stem. Bjorn Merker, an independent neuroscientist in Stockholm, Sweden, argues that the brain stem supports an elementary form of conscious thought in infants with hydranencephaly. "Higher" forms of awareness, including self-awareness, require cortical contributions, but "primary consciousness" or "basic awareness" as an ability to integrate sensations from the environment with one's immediate goals and feelings in order to guide behavior springs from the brain stem, which human beings share with most vertebrates. Psychologist Carroll Izard emphasizes that this form of primary consciousness consists of the capacity to generate emotions and awareness of one's surroundings, but not an ability to talk about what one has experienced. In the same way, people can become conscious of a feeling that they cannot label or describe, a phenomenon that is especially common in pre-verbal infants.

Due to this discovery, medical definitions of brain death as a lack of cortical activity face a serious challenge.

Basic interests

Throughout the brain stem, there are interconnected regions that regulate eye movement that are also involved in organizing information about what to do next, such as reaching for a piece of food or pursuing a potential mate.

Changes in awareness

The ability to consciously detect an image when presented at near-threshold stimulus varies across presentations. One factor is "baseline shifts", due to top down attention that modulates ongoing brain activity in sensory cortex areas that affects the neural processing of subsequent perceptual judgments. Such top down biasing can occur through two distinct processes: an attention driven baseline shift in the alpha waves, and a decision bias reflected in gamma waves.

Living systems view

Outside of the field of neuroscience, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela contributed their Santiago theory of cognition in which they wrote:

Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with or without a nervous system.

This theory contributes a perspective that cognition is a process present at organic levels that people do not usually consider to be aware. Given the possible relationship between awareness and cognition, and consciousness, this theory contributes an interesting perspective in the philosophical and scientific dialogue of awareness and living systems theory.

Communications and information systems

In cooperative settings, awareness is a term used to denote "knowledge created through the interaction of an agent and its environment – in simple terms 'knowing what is going on'". In this setting, awareness is meant to convey how individuals monitor and perceive the information surrounding their colleagues and the environment they are in. This information is incredibly useful and critical to the performance and success of collaborations. Awareness can be further defined by breaking it down into a set of characteristics:

• Knowledge about the state of some environment
• Environments are continually changing, therefore awareness knowledge must be constantly maintained
• Individuals interact with the environment, and maintenance of awareness is accomplished through this interaction.
• Generally part of some other activity, making it a secondary goal to the primary goal of the activity.

Different categories of awareness have been suggested based on the type of information being obtained or maintained:

• Informal awareness – the sense of who's around and what are they up to; information you might know from being collocated with an individual
• Social awareness – the information you maintain about a social or conversational context. This is a subtle awareness maintained through non-verbal cues, such as eye contact, facial express, etc.
• Group-structural awareness – the knowledge of others roles, responsibilities, and status in a group. It is an understanding of group dynamics and the relationship another individual has to the group.
• Workspace awareness – awareness with a focus on the workspace's influence and mediation of awareness information, particularly the location, activity, and changes of elements within the workspace.

These categories are not mutually exclusive, as there can be significant overlap in what a particular type of awareness might be considered. Rather, these categories serve to help understand what knowledge might be conveyed by a particular type of awareness or how that knowledge might be conveyed. Workspace awareness is of particular interest to the CSCW community, due to the transition of workspaces from physical to virtual environments.

While the type of awareness above refers to knowledge a person might need in a particular situation, context awareness and location awareness refer to information a computer system might need in a particular situation. These concepts of large importance especially for AAA (authentication, authorization, accounting) applications.

The term of location awareness still is gaining momentum with the growth of ubiquitous computing. First defined by networked work positions (network location awareness), it has been extended to mobile phones and other mobile communicable entities. The term covers a common interest in whereabouts of remote entities, especially individuals and their cohesion in operation. The term of context awareness is a superset including the concept of location awareness. It extends the awareness to context features of an operational target as well as to the context of an operational area.

Covert awareness

Covert awareness is the knowledge of something without knowing it. The word covert means not openly shown, engaged in, or avowed. Some patients with specific brain damage are, for example, unable to tell if a pencil is horizontal or vertical. Patients who are clinically in a vegetative state (showing no awareness of their surroundings) are found to have no awareness, yet they are able to sometimes detect covert awareness with neural imaging (fMRI). The presence of awareness is clinically measured by the ability to follow commands either verbally or behaviorally. Awareness was detected by asking participants to imagine hitting a tennis ball and to imagine walking from room to room in their house while in the scanner. Using this technique, a patient who fulfilled all of the clinical criteria for the vegetative state was shown to be covertly aware and able to willfully respond to commands by looking at their brain activity.