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The Journal of Neuroscience, March 5, 2008, 28(10):2667-2679; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4748-07.2008

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Neural Dissociation between Visual Awareness and Spatial Attention

Valentin Wyart^1,2 and Catherine Tallon-Baudry^1,2,3

¹Université Pierre et Marie Curie–Paris 6, 75005 Paris, France, ²Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Cognitive Neuroscience and Brain Imaging Laboratory, Unité Propre de Recherche 640, 75013 Paris, France, and ³Magneto- and Electroencephalography Center, Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière, 75013 Paris, France

Correspondence should be addressed to Valentin Wyart, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Cognitive Neuroscience and Brain Imaging Laboratory–LENA, Unité Propre de Recherche 640, 47 Boulevard de l'Hôpital, 75613 Paris cedex 13, France. Email: valentin.wyart{at}chups.jussieu.fr

To what extent does what we consciously see depend on where we attend to? Psychologists have long stressed the tight relationship between visual awareness and spatial attention at the behavioral level. However, the amount of overlap between their neural correlates remains a matter of debate. We recorded magnetoencephalographic signals while human subjects attended toward or away from faint stimuli that were reported as consciously seen only half of the time. Visually identical stimuli could thus be attended or not and consciously seen or not. Although attended stimuli were consciously seen slightly more often than unattended ones, the factorial analysis of stimulus-induced oscillatory brain activity revealed distinct and independent neural correlates of visual awareness and spatial attention at different frequencies in the gamma range (30–150 Hz). Whether attended or not, consciously seen stimuli induced increased mid-frequency gamma-band activity over the contralateral visual cortex, whereas spatial attention modulated high-frequency gamma-band activity in response to both consciously seen and unseen stimuli. A parametric analysis of the data at the single-trial level confirmed that the awareness-related mid-frequency activity drove the seen–unseen decision but also revealed a small influence of the attention-related high-frequency activity on the decision. These results suggest that subjective visual experience is shaped by the cumulative contribution of two processes operating independently at the neural level, one reflecting visual awareness per se and the other reflecting spatial attention.

Key words: magnetoencephalography; gamma; alpha; vision; consciousness; attention

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Received Oct. 19, 2007; revised Dec. 17, 2007; accepted Jan. 20, 2008.

Correspondence should be addressed to Valentin Wyart, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Cognitive Neuroscience and Brain Imaging Laboratory–LENA, Unité Propre de Recherche 640, 47 Boulevard de l'Hôpital, 75613 Paris cedex 13, France. Email: valentin.wyart{at}chups.jussieu.fr

Related articles in J. Neurosci.:

The Relationship between Visual Awareness, Attention, and Report

Simon van Gaal and Johannes J. Fahrenfort
J. Neurosci. 2008 28: 5401-5402. [Full Text]  

This article has been cited by other articles:

				S. van Gaal and J. J. Fahrenfort The Relationship between Visual Awareness, Attention, and Report J. Neurosci., May 21, 2008; 28(21): 5401 - 5402. [Full Text] [PDF]

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