Divided attention in the tactile modality

Attention is important to task performance, and to our conscious awareness. Research and theory on the relationship between attention and consciousness is heavily biased towards the visual domain. Here, we introduce the first translation of the extensively used visual dual-task paradigm to the tactile domain. To measure the degree of conscious access in tactile discrimination, we asked participants to provide confidence rating and characterised it with metacognitive accuracy. Exploring this paradigm in the tactile modality provides unique insights on how consciousness and attention interact outside the visual domain. Our findings shed light on the ongoing debate about the necessity of attention for consciousness and whether attention shares the same underlying principles across modalities. Our study implies that we need to consider modality-specific relationships between attention and consciousness.