Notes
1 Whether attention is always necessary and/or sufficient for awareness in perception is a matter of longstanding debate (Cohen et al., Citation2012; De Brigard, Citation2012; Koch & Tsuchiya, Citation2007; Lamme, Citation2003; Van Boxtel et al., Citation2010). Our point here is just that, in the external domain, attention is usually causally related to which percepts receive conscious processing (Dehaene et al., Citation2006; Posner, Citation1994, Posner, Citation2011; Van Boxtel et al., Citation2010).
2 For this type of experiment, it is not critical that the target representation be identical in its conscious and unconscious states. In fact, the same decoding methods could potentially be used to distinguish between the representation in its conscious (low load) vs. unconscious (high load) states, supporting investigation into how the neural format of the representation changes when internal attention is applied.