Authors: R Davoodi M H Moradi A Yoonessi
Publish Date: 2015/06/26
Volume: 47, Issue: 2, Pages: 144-154
Abstract
While consciousness and attention seem to be tightly connected recent evidence has suggested that one of these processes can be present in the absence of the other Recent researches showed that observers can pay attention to an invisible unconscious stimulus and that a stimulus can be clearly perceived seen in the absence of attention We have proposed a novel psychophysical task to explore neural correlates of topdown attention and consciousness The task is meant to confirm that these two processes can occur independently of each other EEG was recorded during realizations of the task and targetlocked eventrelated potentials ERPs for masked and unmasked conditions were constructed Time features corresponding to the P100 N150 and P300 components were extracted for each channel separately Utilizing these features we employed some common classifiers for classification of the fourfold state Our task could separate attention and consciousness successfully through their neural correlates The results indicate that some of the mentioned components changed when attention or consciousness occurs By comparing difference waves in each condition separately our results introduce new ERP correlates of attention and consciousness We also revealed that parietooccipital areas are the most relevant areas for dissociation between attention and consciousness To our knowledge this is the first time that these correlates are introduced in a separable mode and the classification accuracies are reported for this purpose
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