[1][2] It proposes that brains construct subjective awareness as a schematic model of the process of attention.
It shares similarities with the illusionist ideas of philosophers like Daniel Dennett, Patricia Churchland, and Keith Frankish.
Just like the brain constructs a simplified model of the body to help monitor and control movements of the body, so the brain constructs a simplified model of attention to help monitor and control attention.
The information in that model, portraying an imperfect and simplified version of attention, leads the brain to conclude that it has a non-physical essence of awareness.
[2] The AST describes how an information-processing machine can make the claim that it has a conscious, subjective experience of something.
The brain constructs rich internal models that lie beneath the level of higher cognition or of language.
The AST can be summarized in three broad points:[1] In the theory, the attention schema provides the requisite information that allows the machine to make claims about consciousness.
Again, without the requisite information, the system would obviously be unable to make any claims about the apple or its visual properties.
In the theory, the claim about the presence of subjective experience depends on cognitive access to an internal model of attention.
That internal model does not provide a scientifically precise description of attention, complete with the details of neurons, lateral inhibitory synapses, and competitive signals.
The machine, in relying on that incomplete and inaccurate model of attention, claims to have a metaphysical consciousness of the apple.
In the AST, subjective experience, or consciousness, or the ineffable mental possession of something, is a simplified construct that is a fairly good, if detail poor, description of the act of attending to something.
When we claim to be subjectively conscious of something, we are providing a slightly schematized version of the literal truth.
Those who call consciousness an illusion are extremely careful to define what they mean by "experience" so as to avoid circularity.
[2][6] These findings support the proposal that awareness acts like the internal model for the control of attention.
[1] A main advantage of this public, social use of an attention schema lies in behavioral prediction.
As social animals, we survive in the world partly by predicting the behavior of other people.
AST was developed in analogy to the psychological and neuroscientific work on the body schema, an area of research to which Graziano contributed heavily in his previous publications.
[1] In this section, the central ideas of AST are explained by use of the analogy to the body schema.
The reason is that Kevin's brain has constructed a schematic description of the apple, also sometimes called an internal model.
The internal model is a set of information, such as about size, color, shape, and location, that is constantly updated as new signals are processed.
That internal model, also sometimes called the body schema, is a set of information, constantly updated as new signals are processed, that specifies the size and shape of Kevin's limbs, how they are hinged, how they tend to move, the state they are in at each moment, and what state they are likely to be in over the next few moments.
The primary purpose of this body schema is to allow Kevin's brain to control movement.
His cognitive and linguistic processors have some access to the body schema, and therefore Kevin can answer, "I am grasping the apple with my hand, while my arm is outstretched."
As a result, Kevin reports having a property that lacks any clear physical attributes.
Kevin's account of his consciousness is a partial, schematic description of his state of attention.
AST proposes an adaptive function to that information: it serves as an internal model of one of the brain's most important features, attention.
An automatic airplane-piloting system will work better if it incorporates a model of the dynamics of the airplane.
In this proposal, one of the main adaptive functions of an attention schema is for use in social cognition.
Initial research using brain scanning in humans suggests that both processes recruit cortical networks that converge on the temporoparietal junction.