Summary |
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. |