AUTHOR=Marchetti Giorgio TITLE=Against the View that Consciousness and Attention are Fully Dissociable JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology VOLUME=3 YEAR=2012 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00036 DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00036 ISSN=1664-1078 ABSTRACT=

In this paper, I will try to show that the idea that there can be consciousness without some form of attention, and high-level top-down attention without consciousness, originates from a failure to notice the varieties of forms that top-down attention and consciousness can assume. I will present evidence that: there are various forms of attention and consciousness; not all forms of attention produce the same kind of consciousness; not all forms of consciousness are produced by the same kind of attention; there can be low-level attention (or preliminary attention), whether of an endogenous or exogenous kind, without consciousness; attention cannot be considered the same thing as consciousness.