Exploring the Relationship of Attention and Consciousness: A review

Attention may be understood as the process of selectively concentrating on one aspect of environment while ignoring others at the same time. Whereas, consciousness can be understood as state of arousal in which persons are mentally receptive to signals coming from the surrounding environment. Scholars believe that cognitive processes, attention and consciousness are closely related to each other. But the exact nature of this relationship remains vague. One school of thought claims that the only attended objects are given rise to conscious awareness and that only if the object perceives consciously it can be attended. Several recent studies provided experimental support for cognitive processing in near absence of attention. An alternative school of thought claims that the processing of attention and consciousness are distinct with differentiated functions and neural mechanism in the brain. The evidences are coming from different experimental paradigm like inattentional blindness, change blindness, attentional blink and dual task paradigm for better understanding about the exact relationship between attention and consciousness. Well, at last, the arguments between attention and consciousness still not clear, and more sophisticated and sound methodology are needed to establish clear and vivid relation of both, attention and consciousness.