Unnoticed items in the sensory field still shape thinking and action

Evidence

Secondly, the incessant collection of information by the saccades of an attention that cannot stay still accounts for the multiple PRIMING EFFECTS that psychological experiments often reveal to our great surprise. Indeed, they seem to contradict the premise of William James’s reasoning, according to which ‘Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience.’ In reality, it turns out that the presence of a thing in our sensory field affects our way of thinking, speaking and acting, without our being aware of it. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 366

Categorization

• XREF: Priming effects directly contradict William James’ canonical formulation quoted at loc 354 — a useful internal tension within the book, and a factual wedge against the ‘what I agree to attend to’ model of autonomy. — connects to: Attentive, low-to-the-ground search reveals small creatures the casual eye misses — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 109; The brain actively generates what it expects to see, not what is actually there — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 61