Voluntary auditory change: First-person access to agentive aspects of attention regulation

Abstract

In perceptual psychology, audition and introspection have not yet received as much attention as other topics (e.g., vision) and methods (third-person paradigms). Practical examples and theoretical considerations show that it nevertheless seems promising to treat both topics in conjunction to gain insights into basic structures of attention regulation and respective agentive awareness. To this end, an empirical study on voluntary auditory change was conducted with a non-reactive first-person design. Data were analyzed with a mixed methods approach and compared with an analogous study on visual reversal. Qualitative hierarchical coding and explorative statistics yield a cross-modal replication of frequency patterns of mental activity as well as significant differences between the modalities. On this basis, the role of mental agency in perception is refined in terms of different levels of intention and discussed in the context of the philosophical mental action debate as well as of the Global Workspace/Working Memory account. As a main result, this work suggests the existence and structure of a gradual and developable agentive attention awareness on which voluntary attention regulation can build, and which justifies speaking, in a certain sense, of attentional self-perception.

Wearing face masks impairs dyadic micro-activities in nonverbal social encounter: A mixed-methods first-person study on the sense of I and Thou

“…It is in the mixed-methods integration of these wide-ranging aspects that we see the strength of this research, which is quite close to people’s immediate experience, deploys the proven tools of empirical research, and gives a new impetus to the DSP debate by proposing a quasi-sensory modality mediating between different grades of embodiment. The crucial effect of moving from interaction without mask to interaction with mask points to characteristic, complementarily oscillating forms of mental activity that constitute this I-Thou sense and replicate previous work on social interaction ( Wagemann and Weger, 2021 ) and other cognitive processes ( Wagemann, 2020 , 2022a , b ).…”

“…(A) Relative rating, *p = 0.048; (B) absolute rating. ambivalence, one should neither overestimate nor ignore the significantly longer protocols without mask, also because we found such differences in a between-subjects design on another firstperson topic which could be well explained theoretically (Wagemann, 2022b). So, apart from carry-over effects, a possible explanation would be that there was less to observe and describe under the mask condition than without mask, which seems to be supported to a slight extent by the reported variation of first-person pronouns.…”

Micro-Phenomenology as Experientially Based Access to Consciousness

“…In the literature these mental acts are also dubbed »micro-gestures«. The latter can consist, for instance, in the shift of attention to a more receptive openness towards an affective experience or a more active focusing and exploration of mental content (Wagemann 2022).…”