Attention and Consciousness in Psychology

The two central questions explored by papers in this area are: is there attention in the absence of consciousness (unconscious attention) and is there conscious experience or awareness in the absence of attention (consciousness without attention)? The debates about the existence of unconscious attention are frequently focused on the phenomenon of blindsight, though there have also been various experiments involving normal subjects that are taken to lend support to the existence of unconscious attention. Roughly, the point of contention is whether there is anything that is both unconscious and attended, and the candidates are objects, features of objects, and locations. Change and inattentional blindness experiments are sometimes taken to show that unattended objects or features are not consciously experienced. It has also been argued on an experimental basis that some visual phenomenal experience is unaccessed, and that vision has a finer grain than attention.