Culture and inattentional blindness: a global workspace perspective.

A recent 'necessary conditions' mathematical treatment of Baars' global workspace consciousness model, analogous to Dretske's communication theory analysis of high level mental function, is used to explore the effects of embedding cultural heritage on inattentional blindness. Culture should express itself quite distinctly in this basic psychophysical phenomenon across a great variety of sensory modalities because the limited syntactic and grammatical bandpass of the rate distortion manifold characterizing conscious attention must conform to topological constraints generated by cultural context.