Aug 21, 2008

Attentional Explanations (Part 1)

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The fourth framework for interpreting déjà vu is that an ongoing stream of perceptual experience is divided into two separate perceptions through distraction or inattention. A brief initial perception of a scene under diminished attention is followed immediately by a second perception under full attention. The second impression matches that experienced moments earlier under degraded attention, and the individual does not consciously identify the prior experience as moments old but rather attributes it to a more distant past. Many researchers have espoused different versions of this interpretation (Conklin, 1935; Heymans, 1904; Lalande, 1893; Osborn, 1884; Wigan, 1844), and Titchener (1928) provided the following, oft-cited illustration:

You are about to cross a crowded street, and you take a hasty glance in both directions to make sure of a safe passage. Now your eye is caught, for a moment, by the contents of a shop window; and you pause, though only for a moment, to survey the window before you actually cross the street. . . . The preliminary glance up and down, which ordinarily connects with the crossing in a single attentive experience, is disjointed from the crossing; the look at the window, casual as it was, has been able to disrupt the associative tendencies. As you cross, then, you think “Why, I crossed this street just now”; your nervous system has severed two phases of a single experience, both of which are familiar, and the latter of which appears accordingly as a repetition of the earlier. (pp. 187–188)
Leeds (1944) called this phenomenon split-perception and proposed that an eye blink could possibly divide these two successive perceptions. Mayer and Merckelbach (1999) even suggested that this type of double take may be part of routine perception. The first second of information processing may be a platform from which a “quick and dirty” unconscious processing can have important effects on subsequent reactions to the stimuli around us. Though Mayer and Merckelbach related their speculation to anxiety disorders, their ideas have clear relevance to the déjà vu phenomenon.

Finally, Krijgers Janzen (1958) speculated that an initial and unattended eidetic image matches a regular perception moments later. He argued that all people experience eidetic imagery occasionally and that regular eidetic imagers would experience déjà vu more frequently than individuals who have eidetic images infrequently.

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