 Many scientists of consciousness take there to be evidence for no phenomenal consciousness without access and little if no evidence of phenomenal consciousness outside of access. An important set of studies focuses on the thesis that attention is a necessary gate for phenomenal consciousness, where attention is tied to access. Call this the gatekeeping thesis. To assess that evidence, we must ask: what is attention? An uncontroversial conception of attention is that it is subject selection of a target to inform task performance (Wu 2014b). The experimental studies thought to support the necessity of attention for consciousness draw on this  conception.[6]  For example, in inattentional blindness paradigms (Mack &amp; Rock 1998), attention is directed by asking subjects to perform a task on target T while a surprising stimulus S is presented. This approach tests necessity by ensuring through task performance that the subject is not attending to S. One then measures whether the subject is aware of S by observing whether the subject reports it. If the subject does not report S, then the hypothesis is that failure of attention to S explains the failure of conscious awareness of S and hence the failure of report.