The Relationship Between Consciousness and Attention

Abstract

The relationship between selective attention and consciousness is a close one, leading many scholars to conflate the two. This chapter summarizes psychophysical and neurophysiological evidence arguing that top-down attention and consciousness are distinct phenomena that need not occur together and that can be independently manipulated. Subjects can become conscious of an isolated object, or the gist of the scene in the near-absence of top-down attention. Conversely, subjects can attend to perceptually invisible objects. Most remarkable, topdown attention and consciousness can have opposing effects. Neuroimaging studies are uncovering the distinct hemodynamic signatures of selective attention and consciousness. Untangling their tight relationship is a necessary step in the elucidation of consciousness and its material substrate.

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