The relationship between awareness and attention: evidence from ERP responses.

Visual attention and awareness are intricately linked, but different types of attention play distinct roles. Experiments tracking brain responses show that spatial attention is necessary for the earliest brain correlate of phenomenal consciousness—the raw experience of seeing. This early marker emerged regardless of whether objects were selected by nonspatial attention, though later parts of it were modified by such selection. In contrast, the brain correlate of reflective consciousness, which allows the contents of phenomenal experience to be used for thought and memory, depended on both spatial attention and nonspatial selection. These findings indicate that the relationship between attention and awareness requires distinguishing between different forms of attention and different levels of consciousness.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The relationship between attention and awareness is complex, because both concepts can be understood in different ways. Here we review our recent series of experiments which have tracked the independent contributions of different types of visual attention and awareness to electrophysiological brain responses, and then we report a new experiment focusing on spatial attention, nonspatial selection of objects, and visual consciousness at the same time. The results indicate that the earliest electrophysiological correlate of consciousness, assumed to correlate with "phenomenal consciousness", was dependent on spatial attention, suggesting that spatial attention is a prerequisite for the internal representations of space that provide the medium for phenomenal experience. The correlate of phenomenal consciousness emerged independent of nonspatial selection of objects, but its later part was modified by it. By contrast, the correlate of access to later conscious processing stages ("reflective consciousness") that take the selected contents of phenomenal consciousness as input for conceptual thought and working memory, was dependent on both spatial attention and nonspatial selection. These results imply that one should distinguish between different types of attention and different forms of awareness, when describing the relationship between attention and awareness.