ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by clarifying attention and consciousness and argues that the more discussed issue of attention as gatekeeper should be set aside. Cognitive scientists affirm that attention is selection for information processing. The chapter shows that scientists endorse a basic conception of attention as selection that guides task performance. The empirical sufficient condition informatively makes precise the claim that attention is selection for further processing, where further processing concerns the guidance of task performance. The concept of attention is essentially of a task-relative capacity that can have lots of interesting main and side effects on processing such as precisification and informational control. Gatekeeping is the claim that attention is necessary for consciousness, specifically that one is phenomenally conscious of X only if one is attending to X. The conditions that guarantee attention away from X undercut obtaining the evidence we need regarding consciousness.
