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Attention and consciousness are deeply intertwined: we can attend to what we are conscious of, and conscious experience depends on attentional resources. Yet they may not be identical: inattentional blindness shows we can fail to consciously perceive attended stimuli. What is the relationship between attentional selection and phenomenal consciousness?
Review empirical findings on inattentional blindness and attention. Consider theories that identify consciousness with attended processing.
From your study of phenomenal and access consciousness, you know the distinction between the "what it's like" quality of an experience (phenomenal consciousness) and the availability of information for reasoning and report (access consciousness). From your work on global workspace theory, you know one influential account of how information becomes consciously accessible: it gets "broadcast" to a global workspace, making it available to multiple cognitive systems. The question now is how attention fits into this picture. Attention is the mind's mechanism for selectively processing some information over other information — but is it the same as consciousness, a precondition for it, or something independent?
The naive view is that attention and consciousness are the same: you are conscious of whatever you are attending to, and you attend to whatever you are conscious of. But empirical findings complicate this picture dramatically. Inattentional blindness — made famous by the gorilla experiment — demonstrates that observers focused on one task can fail to notice a salient, unexpected object in plain view. Crucially, the unnoticed stimulus is present and processed to some extent at lower levels, but it fails to reach conscious awareness. This shows that *attention is necessary for consciousness*: attending elsewhere seems to prevent the gorilla from entering phenomenal awareness even though it physically stimulates the retina. Attention is doing real work in determining what becomes conscious.
But is attention *sufficient* for consciousness? Here the picture gets more complex. Some theorists argue that attention and consciousness can come apart in the other direction too: you can attend to something without being phenomenally conscious of it, or have phenomenal consciousness of peripheral stimuli that you're not explicitly attending to. The debate partly hinges on methodology — how do we know whether someone is phenomenally conscious of something they're not attending to? First-person reports are unreliable for unattended stimuli precisely because reporting requires attention. This creates a methodological trap: any evidence for consciousness of unattended stimuli may itself reflect post-hoc attention to those stimuli at the moment of report.
Global workspace theory provides a specific architectural account of how attention connects to access consciousness: attended information gets amplified and broadcast to the global workspace, making it available for verbal report, memory, and executive control. On this view, attention is the mechanism by which information gets access-conscious. But phenomenal consciousness may be a further question. Higher-order theories suggest that a state is phenomenally conscious only when there is a higher-order representation of it — and attention may be what triggers or constitutes that higher-order representation. On these views, attention is doing double duty: it selects information for processing *and* it is partly constitutive of the phenomenal character of the experience.
The practical import of this debate is significant. Change blindness (failure to notice large changes in a scene across cuts or interruptions) and attentional blink (a brief period after detecting one target during which a second target is missed) both reveal that our sense of consciously perceiving a rich visual world is partly an illusion — we actually consciously perceive only a narrow slice of what we think we see, determined by what we attend to. The brain fills in the rest from prior knowledge and expectation. This has implications for how we understand the unity of consciousness, the reliability of eyewitness testimony, and the relationship between conscious experience and cognitive function. Understanding whether attention *produces* consciousness or merely *reveals* it is not merely academic — it shapes our understanding of what we are when we are aware.
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