Empirical support for higher-order theories of conscious awareness

Perceptual consciousness overflows cognitive access

“…This introspective judgment is regarded by some advocates of 'inattentional blindness' as the product of a cognitive illusion -the so-called 'refrigerator light illusion' [13,[24][25][26]] -according to which, one can see items whenever one attends to their location, thereupon assuming that they were already consciously represented [13,24]. Although there is no direct evidence for the refrigerator light illusion, it has been claimed recently that there is direct evidence that the introspection of richness is the product of one of a family of perceptual rather than cognitive illusions [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34].…”

“…In short, the overflow argument has come under pressure both empirically [27][28][29]33,35], and conceptually [27-34] largely on the basis of 'change blindness'. At the same time, support for overflow has come from experiments employing other paradigms [8,9,[36][37][38][39][40][41][42].…”

“…As Cohen and Dennett put it: '[p]articipants can identify cued items because their identities are stored unconsciously until the cue brings them to the focus of attention' ( [29] p. 359). Advocates of this view do not regard subjects' reports of a persisting conscious icon as wholly illusory; rather what some of them claim is that the conscious icon contains generic, non-specific, abstract or gist-like letter representations that are neutral between the shape of one letter and another [28][29][30]33,34,[44][45][46][47][48][49][50]. They postulate what I will call the 'generic illusion', whereby subjects are said to confuse a generic representation of letter-likeness (parts of which can be made more specific via attention) with specific letter-shape representations that are already specified in consciousness.…”

“…A very different idea of what is in consciousness prior to the cue [28,29,33,34] is a scattering of some conscious features or fragments [27,28]. Attentional processes are supposed to combine the unconscious specific information from the cued row with conscious features or fragments to form conscious representations of specific letters in that one row.…”

“…Between the two illusions, the fragment illusion is somewhat more plausible, since it is difficult to understand what it would mean for subjects' consciousness prior to the cue to consist of conscious representations of a grid of instances of letterness without any specific shape representations. Critics of overflow [29,30,33] appeal to cases such as peripheral vision as an example of generic representation. However, even if it is true that we can see movement without shape in the periphery, this would probably stem from specialized motion-detection…”