Multisensory Perception and Bodily Self-Consciousness
Jane Elizabeth Aspell, Bigna Lenggenhager, Olaf Blanke · Frontiers in neuroscience · 2011
Our sensory organs continuously receive a large amount of input from the external world; some of these are important for a successful interaction with the environment, whereas others can be ignored. The operation of selecting relevant signals and ltering out irrelevant information is a key task of the attentional system (Desimone and Duncan 1995; Kastner and Ungerleider 2001). Attentional selection can occur on the basis of many different criteria, with a main distinction between endogenous control (i.e., selection based on voluntary attention, current aims, and knowledge) and stimulus-driven control (i.e., selection based on the intrinsic features of the sensory input). Accordingly, we can decide to pay attention to the face of one person in a crowded room (i.e., attending to subtle details in a rich and complex environment), or attention can be captured by a loud sound in a quiet room (i.e., attention captured by a salient stimulus).