Journal of cognitive neuroscience
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It has been proposed that visual attention and consciousness are separate [Koch, C., & Tsuchiya, N. Attention and consciousness: Two distinct brain processes. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 16-22, 2007] and possibly even orthogonal processes [Lamme, V. ⋯ Behavioral and neural learning effects were found for stimuli presented in the inattention paradigm and not for masked stimuli. Interestingly, the behavioral learning effect only became apparent when performance feedback was given on the task to measure learning, suggesting that the memory trace that is formed during inattention is latent until accessed. The results suggest that learning requires consciousness, and not attention, and further strengthen the idea that consciousness is separate from attention.