Abstract
It has been a long-standing belief that attention is the cause of conscious awareness. However, there are some recent counter-arguments and evidence against this opinion. In this article, it is suggested that these two mental faculties are, though surely intimately related, separate functions. There are cases where attention does not lead to conscious awareness, such as attention without conscious awareness in a blindsight patient and attentional facilitation of figural disappearance. On the other side of the coin, there are cases where there is conscious awareness without attention. An ongoing experiment in our laboratory on change blindness suggests that conscious detection of peripheral changes can be achieved with attention fully concentrated on a central high demanding task.
