Object-Based Attention Without Awareness

Object-based attention without awareness.

Attention and awareness are often considered to be related. Some forms of attention can, however, facilitate the processing of stimuli that remain unseen. It is unclear whether this dissociation extends beyond selection on the basis of primitive properties, such as spatial location, to situations in which there are more complex bases for attentional selection. The experiment described here show...

Object-based attention occurs regardless of object awareness.

In this study, we investigated whether awareness of objects is necessary for object-based guidance of attention. We used the two-rectangle method (Egly, Driver, & Rafal, 1994) to probe object-based attention and adopted the continuous flash suppression technique (Tsuchiya & Koch, 2005) to control for the visibility of the two rectangles. Our results show that object-based attention, as indexed ...

Phenomenal awareness can emerge without attention

In a recent debate, the views that top-down attention is necessary for consciousness (Cohen et al., 2012a,b) and that consciousness is independent of top-down attention (Tsuchiya et al., 2012) have clashed. Here, we list the overlooked or ignored arguments that should be considered before deciding that consciousness is inevitably the result of attention. The issue of relation of bottom-up atten...

Endogenous Orienting of Attention without Awareness

This study investigated the role of awareness in endogenous orienting of visual attention. Twenty-five subjects performed a Covert Attention Task, in which target stimuli were preceded by masked and unmasked symbolic central cues (i.e., digits). Results showed a facilitation effect in both the aware and unaware condition, suggesting that a symbolic cue was able to induce an endogenous orienting...

Attention without awareness: A Brief Review