P&N Colloquium series: Fractionating Attention, Integrating Awareness

"A stimulus or event, be it due to its behavioral relevance or its salient properties, can powerfully capture our attention and occupy our awareness. This capture is associated with the activation of large-scale cortical attention networks. I will show that, on the one hand, attentional capture can actually be decomposed into a cascade of processes ¿ including event detection, attention shifting and event evaluation ¿ each associated with distinct nodes of the attention networks. I will also show that, on the other hand, such attention capture may lead to an all-or-none conscious percept that has global effects on functional connectivity beyond the confines of the attention networks."