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.

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.

Müller-Lyer illusion is an example of misleading information in external awareness: the upper horizontal line appears longer than the lower horizontal line because of the attached arrowheads, but both lines have objectively the same length.

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.

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.