Brain Imaging Experiments show attention and awareness as seperate processes

[SWM]

In everyday life, attention and awareness appear tightly interwoven. Attending to the scissors on the right side of your desk, you become aware of their attributes, for example the red handles. Vice versa, the red handles could attract your attention to the scissors. However, a number of behavioural observations have recently led scientists to postulate that attention and awareness are fundamentally different processes and not necessarily connected. In the study now published in the journal Science, scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in cooperation with Japanese colleagues provide the first experimental evidence that the primary visual cortex, the entrance stage to cortical visual processing, is modulated only by attention and not by awareness. This finding supports the hypothesis that attention and awareness differentially affect nerve cells.

read more at source: http://www.mpg.de/4637517/attention_awareness_uncoupled?filter_order=L

The outcome of these experiments may even hold implications for philosophy and psychology: So far, many scientists hold a holistic view about awareness being part of all other areas of the brain and being inseparably interwoven with other mental processes. That is because previous studies without independently controlling attention have shown robust awareness modulation in the BOLD signal of the primary visual cortex. According to the new results, these findings have to be put into question. But Masataka Watanabe cautions: “The experiment is one of a kind, showing differences in modulation between awareness and attention in the primary visual cortex, hence supporting the idea that neural activity corresponding to attention and awareness are, if not more, partially dissociated. The results need to be followed up by other types of stimuli, measurement methods, species, etc., with independent manipulation of attention and awareness.” In further experiments he wants to explore at exactly which level the hierarchical visual system starts to be modulated by awareness.

read more at source: http://www.mpg.de/4637517/attention_awareness_uncoupled?filter_order=L