Visual attention and awareness can be experimentally separated. In a recent study (Webb et al., Cortical networks involved in visual awareness independently of visual attention. Proc Natl Acad USA 2016a;113:13923-8), we suggested that awareness was associated with activity in a set of cortical networks that overlap the temporoparietal junction. In a comment, Morales et al. (Measuring away an attentional confound? Neurosci Conscious 2017;3:doi:10.1093/nc/nix018) suggested that we had imperfectly controlled attention thereby jeopardizing the experimental logic. Though we agree that attention behaves differently in the presence and absence of awareness, we argue it is still possible to roughly equate the level of attention between aware and unaware conditions, and that an imbalance in attention probably does not explain our experimental results.
Keywords: attention; awareness; psychophysics.