 The central component of the late-selection theory, as it was originally understood, was that the effect of withdrawing attention from a stimulus is to make it the case that that stimulus is processed without the subject’s awareness, rather than not being processed at all. This component of the view has, to some extent, been vindicated. The claim that unattended stimuli are subjected to some processing of which the subject lacks awareness, including some processing of those stimuli’s semantic properties, is now uncontroversial. Since we know that the semantic properties of unattended stimuli can, for example, produce negative priming effects (Tipper and Driver, 1988), we know that unattended stimuli are processed in a way that allows at least some of their semantic properties to be encoded. The semantic properties of unattended items have such effects despite the fact that experimental participants are typically unaware of what those properties are.