Exploring relationship between attention and consciousness using Dual-Task paradigm

The ongoing debate on distinctiveness of attention and consciousness form decades claims that some form of awareness exist even in absence of attention. To testify this claim dual-task paradigm has been recreated for independent manipulation of top-down attention and awareness. While the subject are engaged in an attentional demanding central letter task, for awareness periphery task consisting gist of the natural scene, animal image and gender were presented for discrimination for less than 100ms. The subject performed in both single-task and dual-task conditions. After an adequate amount of training, stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was determined for all subjects individually. After final testing we can conclude that attention and consciousness are distinct phenomena. Subject could discriminate natural scene and animal images both in coloured and greyscale with performance as high as 90% correct judgement, while in gender discrimination the performance was moderately low around 70-80%.