Independent neural definitions of visual awareness and attention

In this chapter, what I will try is to explain the very related phenomena of attention and awareness at the basic neural level. It will be an endeavour in the spirit of cognitive neuroscience, where cognitive psychology and neuroscience meet, to obtain new definitions for behavioral and mental phenomena. I will mainly focus on trying to give such core definitions, mostly omitting or only referring to the experimental evidence supporting it, because that has been presented in earlier reviews already (Lamme 2000; 2003; Lamme and Roelfsema, 2000; Lamme et al., 2000). Also, space does not allow me to relate these definitions to other, often very related, theories about the same issues, which is by no means to imply that what I write here is not inspired by what many others have produced.