Qualia structures collapse for geometric shapes, but not faces, when spatial attention is withdrawn

The effects of top-down attention on perception have been intensively studied using binary categorization tasks (e.g., seen vs. unseen). However, such tasks poorly characterise the quality of experience, or qualia, for short. To characterise attentional effects on qualia, we combined a dual-task attention paradigm with similarity rating tasks to examine whether relational structures of qualia are altered by top-down attentional amplification. Under the same physical input, withdrawing attention collapsed the structures of qualia of letters (N=14) and red/green bisected disks (N=14), but not of faces (N=13), as quantified via an unsupervised optimal transport alignment technique. Alignment accuracy was high for face qualia structures obtained under the fully versus poorly attended conditions but not for the letters and disks. Our approach that combines similarity ratings, unsupervised alignment and attentional perturbation is a powerful new approach to elucidate the structural properties of consciousness.