Awareness

For other uses of "Awareness" or "Aware", see Aware (disambiguation).

"Noticing" redirects here. For the far-right use of the term, see The Noticer. For the book by Steve Sailer, see Noticing (book).

In the fields of philosophy and psychology, awareness is the knowledge or perception of something. As such, it is the ability to consciously perceive, understand, and respond both generally to one's surroundings and specifically to individual stimuli. The concept is often synonymous with consciousness; however, one can be aware of something without being explicitly conscious of it (e.g., blindsight). Essentially, awareness is the state of being attuned to, or mindful of something, whether it is a physical sensation or an idea. The states of awareness are also associated with the states of experience, so that the structure represented in awareness is mirrored in the structure of experience.

Definition

Awareness is a broad term for subjective experience, cognitive access to information, or the ability to notice and understand internal and external events. Its precise definition is disputed and varies by context and discipline.

Awareness is typically characterized as awareness of something: it is about or directed at certain contents. For example, when a person consciously perceives a tree or hears a voice then the tree or voice becomes a content of their awareness. Awareness is not limited to perceptual objects in the environment but also includes internal states, such as bodily sensations of warmth, emotions, desires, intentions, judgments, and thoughts about abstract ideas. The expression aware that is often used in a factive meaning, according to which one can be aware only of things that are real. In a broader sense, awareness also encompasses contents that do not accurately represent reality or are not believed to be true, such as imagined scenarios, dreams, and hallucinations.

Which contents enter awareness is influenced by various factors, including the external situation; the strength and novelty of stimuli; and the individual's attention, goals, expectations, and memories. The different contents are typically not presented as isolated phenomena but are embedded in a broader context of meaningful patterns, including information about their emotional significance to the individual and practical implications for behavior and decision-making. In this regard, awareness often involves an active interpretation that organizes and evaluates information rather than an impartial, passive representation.

Some characterizations understand awareness as an all-or-nothing phenomenon: it is either fully present or fully absent. Another outlook regards awareness as a gradual state that can arise in different degrees. This view reflects the idea that one can be aware of more or less contents at the same time and that those contents can have varying degrees of clarity, vagueness, and uncertainty. Awareness contrasts with unawareness, which is a lack of subjective experience or knowledge. Unawareness can apply to specific contents of experience, like when a person is unaware of a background noise, or to a complete absence of awareness, which may be the case during dreamless sleep or coma. Certain forms of cognition occur without awareness, such as low-level neural processes underlying face recognition and language processing.

Awareness plays a central role in everyday life by helping individuals perceive and respond to their surroundings, making information available to cognitive processes such as reasoning and reflection, and allowing individuals to monitor and regulate their behavior by modifying automatic responses or engaging in deliberate actions. It is studied in several fields, including philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. Research is not limited to human awareness but also addresses the awareness of nonhuman animals.

The term awareness originated from the Old English word gewær, which has Germanic roots. The Old English term entered Middle English as the word iwar, which developed into the modern English adjective aware. The noun awareness was formed by adding the suffix -ness, with the earliest known use in the 1830s in the work of the physician and writer David Macbeth Moir.

Relation to consciousness

Awareness is closely related to phenomenal consciousness and the terms are often used as near synonyms. Understood in this sense, awareness is characterized as subjective experience that involves a first-person perspective on oneself and the environment. It is not merely the availability of information but also includes a phenomenal dimension or experiential character of what it feels like to encounter the contents of awareness.

However, the terms awareness and consciousness are not always treated as synonyms, and some theorists explicitly distinguish between them. According to one view, awareness is access to mental contents that makes information available or a set of cognitive and behavioral capacities through which individuals acquire, process, and use information. These capacities can include the abilities to respond to environmental stimuli; to discriminate between objects; to store, retrieve, and interpret information; to formulate plans of action; and to report one's mental states. According to one interpretation, this function-based characterization implies that any biological or artificial system with the relevant capacities can be described as aware, regardless of whether it has phenomenal consciousness. In this sense, it is possible to distinguish between conscious awareness, which is accompanied by subjective experience, and unconscious awareness, which involves cognitive processes without phenomenal consciousness. For example, the medical condition of blindsight, in which people with brain damage lose visual consciousness but can still respond to certain forms of visual information, is sometimes suggested as an example of unconscious awareness.

Other related concepts

Awareness is closely related to attention, a process or ability that selects certain contents and positions them at the center of awareness. Attention prioritizes certain objects or features while filtering out irrelevant contents, thereby focusing cognitive resources on aspects considered relevant. Awareness is not limited to the focus of attention and includes peripheral contents that are noticed but remain in the background. For example, a person may focus attention on a laptop while remaining peripherally aware of an ashtray in the corner of their desk.

Wakefulness, another connected concept, is a condition of being alert and responsive to one's environment rather than being asleep, anaesthetized, or in a coma. Awareness is typically associated with wakefulness but may also occur without it, as when a person is dreaming and aware of the dream scenario. It may also be possible to be awake without being aware; for example, a person in a vegetative state with severe brain damage may still undergo sleep–wake cycles while lacking signs of awareness.

The concept of awareness further overlaps with those of perception, knowledge, and sentience. Perception organizes and interprets sensory information about the world, including visual and auditory impressions. It is a central form of awareness but not the only one, since people can also be aware of internal states, such as emotions and thoughts. Knowledge is often characterized as a cognitive achievement, such as a true belief based on good reasons. Awareness overlaps with knowledge in this sense and can be a source of knowledge. However, awareness can also present inaccurate contents, such as hallucinations. Sentience is usually defined as the capacity to experience positive or negative feelings, such as pleasure and pain. Awareness can involve sentience in this sense but may also include contents other than feelings.

Peripheral awareness

Peripheral awareness is the human ability to process information regarding all five senses at the periphery of attention, such as acknowledging the distant sounds of people outside while sitting indoors and concentrating on a specific task, such as reading. Another definition is awareness of "mental contents that are on the fringe of focal awareness". Awareness systems are communication systems designed to help remotely connected groups of individuals to maintain peripheral awareness of one another. Peripheral vision is defined as the perception of visual stimuli at or near the edge of the field of vision.

Peripheral awareness allows one to be prepared to respond to unexpected events. For example, when walking down a busy street while talking to a friend, peripheral awareness will allow for alertness to potential hazards such as cars or pedestrians coming into proximity that may not have been noticed otherwise.

Self-awareness

Main article: Self-awareness

Popular ideas about consciousness suggest the phenomenon describes self-awareness, the condition of being aware of oneself. Modern systems theory, which offers insights into how the world works through an understanding that all systems follow system rules, approaches self-awareness within its understanding of how large complex living systems work. According to Gregory Bateson, the mind is the dynamics of self-organization, and awareness is crucial in this process. Modern systems theory maintains that humans, as living systems, not only have awareness of their environment but also self-awareness particularly with their capability for logic and curiosity.

Efforts to describe consciousness in neurological terms have focused on describing networks in the brain that develop awareness of the qualia developed by other networks. As awareness provides the materials from which one develops subjective ideas about their experience, it is said that one is aware of one's own awareness state. This organization of awareness of one's own inner experience is given a central role in self-regulation.

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

See also: Blindsight

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.

See also

The dictionary definition of presence of mind at Wiktionary

• Awareness ribbon – Symbol intended to show support or bring attention to a cause
• Choiceless awareness – Concept in philosophy, psychology and spirituality
• Consciousness raising – Activism which use awareness campaigns
• Ethics – Philosophical study of morality
• Illusion of explanatory depth – Form of cognitive bias
• Indefinite monism
• List of awareness ribbons – Ribbon colors worn to signal issue awareness
• Mental Health Awareness Month – American observation in May since 1949
• Mental Illness Awareness Week – Awareness week in the United States
• Philosophy of mind – Branch of philosophy
• Public awareness of climate change
• Public awareness of science – Aspect of education and communication
• Situation awareness – Perception of one's environment
• Suicide awareness – Effort to raise awareness of suicidal behaviors
• Value (ethics and social sciences) – Personal value, basis for ethical actionPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets

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External links

• Media related to Awareness at Wikimedia Commons
• LaBar KS, Disterhoft JF (1998). "Conditioning, awareness, and the hippocampus". Hippocampus. 8 (6): 620–6. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1098-1063(1998)8:6<620::AID-HIPO4>3.0.CO;2-6. PMID 9882019. S2CID 11974202.
• Cornell University: Recent findings in the awareness of brain damaged people.