Abstract

Do studies of perception without awareness and studies of perception without attention address a similar underlying concept of awareness? To answer this question, we compared qualitative differences in performance across variations in stimulus quality with qualitative differences in performance across variations in the direction of attention . The qualitative differences were based on three different phenomena: Stroop priming, false recognition, and exclusion failure. In all cases, variations in stimulus quality and variations in the direction of attention led to parallel findings. These results suggest that perception with and without awareness and perception with and without attention are equivalent ways of describing the same underlying process distinction