The close relationship between attention and consciousness has led many psychologists to conflate these processes. In this talk, I will summarize recent psychophysical and neurophysiological evidence, arguing that top-down attention and consciousness are distinct phenomena that need not occur together and that can be manipulated using distinct paradigms.

The evidence includes recent findings that show attentional modulation of perceptually invisible objects. More contentious is the finding that subjects can become conscious of an isolated object, or the gist of the scene in the near absence of top-down attention.

I also cover the recent flurry of studies that independently manipulated attention and consciousness, including an example where top-down attention and consciousness have opposing effects. Such dissociations are easier to understand when the different functions of these two processes are considered, for example, attention as analyzer and consciousness as integrator. Separating the effects of selective visual attention from those of visual consciousness is of paramount importance to untangle the neural substrates of consciousness from those for attention

Dr Tsuchiya was awarded a PhD under the supervision of Prof Christof Koch from the Computation & Neural Systems (CNS) program at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2005.

He then underwent postdoctoral training at Caltech under Prof Ralph Adolphs until 2010. Receiving a PRESTO grant from Japan Science and Technology (JST) agency, Dr Tsuchiya returned to Japan in 2010, with visiting scholar appointments with RIKEN Brain Science Institute and Advanced Telecommunications Research. In Jan 2012, he joined the School of Psychology and Psychiatry at Faculty of Medicine, Nursing, and Health Sciences at Monash University as an Associate Professor.

His main research interest is to uncover the neuronal basis of consciousness. Specifically, he focuses on 1) the scope and limit of non-conscious processing, 2) the relationship between attention and consciousness, and 3) the neuronal correlates of consciousness by analysing the multi-channel neuronal recording obtained in monkeys and humans.

Video-recording of colloquium
Campus Map