Can there be attention without perception?

Siddharth Vadnerkar
2013PH10875
September 22, 2014

What is Perception?
Perception is the process through which we register, organize and interpret
stimuli. A stimulus is a sensory information that our body registers through
different sensory channels, like the auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory, and
oral senses. For example, if a telephone rings, then our ears register the
sound of the telephone and that is the stimulus. This stimulus is interpreted
by the brain as the ringing telephone. This whole process of interpretation
of different stimuli is known as perception.

What is Attention?
Attention is the filtering of different perceptions in order to focus on a single
perception more effectively. What filters out is sometimes voluntary, but
attention sometimes can be forced by certain sudden stimuli. For example
if you hear a sudden bang then your attention will be diverted toward that
stimulus.

What links the two?

Our perceptions are important for Attention as attention is merely a selective
focus on the different perceptions. This is known as the bottom up approach.
However our perceptions can also be influenced by what our attention is at
at the moment. This is known as the top down approach.
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To answer the question:

Perception is necessary for attention, however attention is not necessary for
perception. Perception happens pre-attentively. Taking the same example of
the telephone, we see that the sound of the ring is first registered and then
the attention is shifted to this sudden stimulus. This indicates that perception happens before we have our attention is at the stimulus itself, and
thus means that perception can happen without attention. Having said that,
attention is most definitely required for a conscious perception of stimuli.
Something that we arent paying much attention to can only be processed so
much. Having our attention diverts our mental resources toward the stimulus that we are observing, and very little is left for the processing for the
perception. This is why for conscious and high quality perception, we need
our attention directed toward the said stimuli.
However, even if that is the case, attention does influence our perception.
What our attention is towards at a given time influences the context in which
we interpret the stimulus. Like, we can interpret B as 13 depending on if
it appears in the alphabet or the numerals. This leads us to the conclusion
that attention, while not wholly necessary for perception, does influence our
latter perceptions.
Summing up: Only poor perception can happen without perception.