The Relationship Between Attention and Consciousness

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In some cases, automatic top-down processing of stimuli even seems obligatory. J. R. Stroop (1935) first demonstrated the obligatory nature of reading. In the study, subjects were presented with a list of words of various colors: red, green, blue, brown, and purple. The words were presented in color so that each word was not printed in its representative color; that is, the word “red” could appear in blue ink, or the word “brown” in green ink. The subjects were then asked to relay the color of the ink that the word was printed in rather than the word itself. The results indicated that, compared to when word color was matched with the typed color, those who were presented with conflicting stimuli had slower relay times when naming the colors. This phenomena is explained by the concept of interference, in that related stimuli that are presented simultaneously will interfere with one another. In this case the unconscious processing of the words accounts for the interference; although one is focusing attention on determining the color of the word, the unconscious recognition of the word is presented to consciousness and the relationship between the two stimuli distract the focus of attention. Thus, these top-down attention events effect conscious perception of stimuli.
All of the aforementioned literature focuses on visual stimuli. However, this is not the only important stimulus when studying attention systems. Like memory systems, different sensory stimuli may have separate but interconnected attention systems that effect consciousness. The following proposed study focuses on the attention system of tactile stimulation. Literature on tactile attention is more limited than visual and auditory stimuli because of the ease of manipulat...

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