Access refers to its conscious “taking possession of the mind”—the subject of the present review. Empirical evidence indicates that selection can occur without conscious processing (Koch and Tsuchiya, 2007). For instance, selective spatial attention can be attracted to the location of a target stimulus that remains invisible (Bressan and Pizzighello, 2008, McCormick,

1997, Robitaille and Jolicoeur, 2006 and Woodman and Luck, 2003). Selective attention can also amplify the processing of stimuli that remain nonconscious (Kentridge et al., 2008, Kiefer and Brendel, selleck products 2006 and Naccache et al., 2002). Finally, in simple displays with a single target, conscious access can occur independently of selection (Wyart and Tallon-Baudry, 2008). In cluttered displays, however, selection appears to be a prerequisite of conscious access: when faced with several competing stimuli, we need attentional selection in order to gain conscious access to just one of them (Dehaene and Naccache, AZD6244 concentration 2001 and Mack and Rock, 1998). These findings indicate that selective attention and conscious access are related but dissociable concepts that should be carefully separated, attention frequently serving as a “gateway” that regulates which information reaches conscious processing. With this vocabulary at hand, we turn to empirical studies of conscious access. The simplest experiments consist in presenting a brief sensory stimulus

that is sometimes consciously accessible, sometimes not, and using behavior, neuroimaging, and neurophysiological recording to monitor the depth of its processing and how it differs as a function of conscious reportability. Linifanib (ABT-869) Behavioral evidence. A visual stimulus that is masked and remains invisible can nevertheless affect behavior and brain activity at multiple levels (for review, see

Kouider and Dehaene, 2007 and Van den Bussche et al., 2009b). Subliminal priming has now been convincingly demonstrated at visual, semantic, and even motor levels. For instance, when a visible target image is preceded by a subliminal presentation of the same image, simple decisions, such as judging whether it refers to an object or animal, are accelerated compared to when the image is not repeated. Crucially, this repetition effect resists major changes in the physical stimulus, such as presenting the same word in upper case versus lower case ( Dehaene et al., 2001) or presenting the same face in two different orientations ( Kouider et al., 2009), suggesting that invariant visual recognition can be achieved without awareness. At the semantic level, subliminal extraction of the meaning of words has now been demonstrated for a variety of word categories (e.g., Gaillard et al., 2006, Naccache and Dehaene, 2001 and Van den Bussche et al., 2009a). At even more advanced levels, a subliminal stimulus can bias motor responses ( Dehaene et al., 1998b and Leuthold and Kopp, 1998).