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The neural correlates of attention and awareness

Nature Reviews Psychology volume 1, page 253 (2022)Cite this article

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It is not easy to describe the difference between attention and awareness. It might seem as if they are the same thing, because attention and awareness are often linked: when we pay attention to something, we become consciously aware of it. At the same time, when we are not paying attention, we can miss even conspicuous events (a phenomenon known as ‘inattentional blindness’). Nevertheless, as reviewed by Koch and Tsuchiya in 2007, evidence from psychophysics experiments demonstrates that attention and awareness should not be confused or equated. Despite widespread interest in consciousness, it was only in 2011 that Watanabe and colleagues provided compelling evidence that attention and awareness have distinct neural correlates. This finding brings us closer to understanding how consciousness arises in the brain.

In their seminal article, Watanabe and colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the effects of attention and visual awareness on activity in primary visual cortex (V1). To dissociate the effects of attention and visual awareness, the authors independently manipulated them using a two-by-two factorial design. Attention was either directed towards a target stimulus (by asking participants to indicate the visibility of the target stimulus) or away from it (by asking participants to perform an unrelated letter detection task). Visual awareness was manipulated using a modified continuous flash suppression task, which rendered the target stimulus either visible or invisible to participants. Crucially, conditions did not differ in terms of visual input; only the subjective percept differed.

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References

Original article

  • Watanabe, M. et al. Attention but not awareness modulates the BOLD signal in the human V1 during binocular suppression. Science 334, 829–831 (2011)

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Related articles

  • Cohen, M. A. et al. The attentional requirements of consciousness. Trends Cog. Sci. 16, 411–417 (2012)

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  • Koch, C. & Tsuchiya, N. Attention and consciousness: two distinct brain processes. Trends Cog. Sci. 11, 16–22 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands

    Shanice E. W. Janssens

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  1. Shanice E. W. Janssens
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Correspondence to Shanice E. W. Janssens.

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The author declares no competing interests.

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Cite this article

Janssens, S.E.W. The neural correlates of attention and awareness. Nat Rev Psychol 1, 253 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-022-00049-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-022-00049-9

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