Talk, Fred Hamker: "Mechanisms of Attention implement an early Gate of Consciousness in Object Substitution Masking"

Not all stimuli enter a state we refer to as a conscious percept. This transition from early sensory processing to a subjective experience, referred to as the gate to consciousness, has been extensively debated in the recent 20 years. However, the debate struggled with the role of attention as a gatekeeper. Both, attention and consciousness are not well defined at a more formal and precise level, which makes individual conclusions heavily dependent on ones own definition of attention. We here take a rigorous formal approach using a neuro-computational model of attention and verify its contribution to the gate to consciousness in object substitution masking (OSM). We first ground our model with data from attention experiments. Next we apply our model to key experiments of OSM. We observed that the model can account for much of the OSM data by its inherent attentive dynamics. In conclusion, attention is proposed as a critical gatekeeper to allow for a conscious access in object substitution masking.

Programm "Forschungskolloquium Experimentelle Psychologie - Sommersemester 2025"