From Attention to Awareness: Exploring Template Tuning as the Basis for Consciousness

The Theory of Visual Attention (TVA; Bundesen, 1990) describes how attention operates through the combined processes of object selection and categorization. This is crucial for systems with severe capacity limitations, such as working memory. This limitation is in stark contrast to how people experience the environment. While TVA does not directly address awareness, Bundesen and Habekost (2008) have related TVA to Block’s (1995) distinction between access and phenomenal awareness. Access consciousness (A-consciousness) is equated with visual short-term memory, while phenomenal consciousness (P-consciousness) corresponds to iconic memory—a fleeting experience of seeing more than we can access. Nevertheless, TVA does not account for a range of phenomena related to awareness, such as gist perception (e.g., Potter, 1976), and it remains unclear how history effects, such as serial dependence (e.g., Fisher & Whitney, 2014), influence categorization.

Recently, we have proposed that the template-matching procedure in TVA may play a key role in understanding human awareness, coining this approach as the Template Tuning Theory (Brogaard & Sørensen, 2023a). While phenomena such as serial dependence may eventually be incorporated into TVA's bias parameter, expertise-related modulations, as demonstrated by Sørensen and Kyllingsbæk (2012), likely align more closely with changes in the template-matching process and the eta parameter. We suggest that template matching is driven by minimizing the prediction error between mental templates and sensory signals (Brogaard & Sørensen, 2023b). Additionally, templates need to be dynamic in nature, adapting and integrating new information, which in turn alters the experiential quality—or qualia—of the observer (Brogaard & Sørensen, 2024).