A dissociation between selective attention and conscious awareness in the representation of temporal order information

Eimer, M.; Grubert, A.

doi:10.1016/j.concog.2015.01.001

A dissociation between selective attention and conscious awareness in the representation of temporal order information

Eimer, M.; Grubert, A.

Authors

M. Eimer

Dr Anna Grubert anna.k.grubert@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor

Abstract

Previous electrophysiological studies have shown that attentional selection processes are highly sensitive to the temporal order of task-relevant visual events. When two successively presented colour-defined target stimuli are separated by a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of only 10 ms, the onset latencies of N2pc components to these stimuli (which reflect their attentional selection) precisely match their objective temporal separation. We tested whether such small onset differences are accessible to conscious awareness by instructing participants to report the category (letter or digit) of the first of two target-colour items that were separated by an SOA of 10, 20, or 30 ms. Performance was at chance level for the 10 ms SOA, demonstrating that temporal order information which is available to attentional control processes cannot be utilized for conscious temporal order judgments. These results provide new evidence that selective attention and conscious awareness are functionally separable, and support the hypothesis that attention and awareness operate at different stages of cognitive processing.

Citation

Eimer, M., & Grubert, A. (2015). A dissociation between selective attention and conscious awareness in the representation of temporal order information. Consciousness and Cognition, 35, 274-281. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2015.01.001

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Jan 5, 2015
Online Publication Date	Jan 22, 2015
Publication Date	Sep 1, 2015
Deposit Date	Jan 18, 2017
Publicly Available Date	Apr 24, 2017
Journal	Consciousness and Cognition
Print ISSN	1053-8100
Publisher	Elsevier
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	35
Pages	274-281
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2015.01.001
Public URL	https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1366931

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Copyright Statement
Revised version with figures NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Consciousness and Cognition. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Consciousness and Cognition, 35, September 2015, 274-281, 10.1016/j.concog.2015.01.001.