Conférence «Consciousness is attention»

Jesse Prinz, CUNY Graduate Center.

Recent work in cognitive neuroscience and psychology established a close relationship between attention and consciousness. There is evidence that consciousness comes and goes with attention. This suggests that attention is the basis of consciousness, and that the neural correlates of attention are the neural correlates of consciousness. There is, however, also a growing body of research that tries to establish a double dissociation between attention and consciousness. In this lecture, evidence for the link between attention and consciousness is reviewed, and alternative interpretations of alleged dissociations are offered.