Abstract
What is the relationship between attention and conscious awareness? Awareness sometimes appears to be restricted to the contents of focused attention, yet at other times irrelevant distractors will dominate awareness. This contradictory relationship has also been reflected in an abundance of discrepant research findings leading to an enduring controversy in cognitive psychology. Lavie's load theory of attention suggests that the puzzle can be solved by considering the role of perceptual load. Although distractors will intrude upon awareness in conditions of low load, awareness will be restricted to the content of focused attention when the attended information involves high perceptual load. Here, we review recent evidence for this proposal with an emphasis on the various subjective blindness phenomena, and their neural correlates, induced by conditions of high perceptual load. We also present novel findings that clarify the role of attention in the response to stimulus contrast. Overall, this article demonstrates a critical role for perceptual load across the spectrum of perceptual processes leading to awareness, from the very early sensory responses related to contrast detection to explicit recognition of semantic content.
Highlights
The terms attention and awareness have acquired various meanings over years of intensive study of both
We review the contributions of load theory to understand the relationship between attention, awareness and the related neural activity, while including novel data that demonstrate a novel interaction between perceptual load and the fundamental mechanisms of contrast sensitivity
If high perceptual load reduces both the signal in one area and weakens the strength of vertical connections that mediate feedback loops between areas, awareness for primed stimuli would be reduced when the load is high enough. Indirect support for this suggestion comes from the findings that awareness of natural scenes does depend on attention in tasks that appear to involve a higher level of perceptual load
Summary
The terms attention and awareness have acquired various meanings over years of intensive study of both. Such findings led to the opposing late selection view in which attentional selection occurs later in the processing stream, after full perceptual awareness, filtering out irrelevant information from processes such as memory and overt responses [4] Under this view, failures to note unattended events, which provided support for the early selection view, merely reflected failures of memory rather than perception. Note that with respect to the perennial issue of the relationship between attention and awareness, the distinction that load theory makes between top-down attention selection settings, which are under voluntary control, and the involuntary allocation of limited-capacity perceptual resources proves useful. With the mechanistic definition of attention in load theory in which selection will depend on whether capacity limits are reached or not, it is clear that in conditions of low load all stimuli are attended, including those specified as irrelevant. We review the contributions of load theory to understand the relationship between attention, awareness and the related neural activity, while including novel data that demonstrate a novel interaction between perceptual load and the fundamental mechanisms of contrast sensitivity
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