Is attention a prerequisite for visual awareness?

Although nothing is so familiar as our own consciousness, it is surprisingly hard to fully explain. It is still unclear how combining wholly unconscious processes (i.e. molecular interactions) eventually lead to conscious experiences. Furthermore, consciousness is also a practically relevant topic. Disturbances in awareness (such as blindness, the lack of visual awareness) severely hamper the quality of life. The current research aims to progress our understanding of consciousness, by investigating the relationship between visual awareness and attention. The findings of Change Blindness (CB) and Inattentional Blindness (IB) suggest that visual awareness is limited and that there is no visual experience in the absence of attention. In three series of experiments we will validate these claims using different experimental techniques. The goal of the first experiments is to determine the contents of visual experience. In the second and third series of experiments we will investigate whether CB and IB are due to limitations in memory rather than in perception. For this we will use behavioural measures (Experiment 2), as well as fMRI (Experiment 3). Altogether the outcome of our experiments will reveal if attention is necessary for conscious perception, and thereby help to uncover the foundations of visual awareness.