Attention and consciousness in the tactile domain

Consciousness, despite decades of research, is still an enigma that puzzles many scientists. Most of the studies investigating consciousness and the intricate interplay with attention (top-down selective attention and its necessity for consciousness) rely predominantly on visual studies. This severely limits our understanding of how attention and consciousness operate outside the visual modality, and whether the underlying principles across modalities are the same. One of the aims of this thesis is to test the generalisability of the visual findings. This thesis contributes novel investigation to test the generalisation of the findings in the visual domain to the tactile modality. The results of this thesis suggest that consciousness operates in a similar manner between modalities, but attention may not. As this is the first tactile dual-task investigation with metacognitive measurements, more research is needed to make a more affirmative claim.