Abstract:Some studies of unconscious cognition rely on judgments of participants stating
that they have “not seen” the critical stimulus (e.g., in a masked-priming
experiment). Trials in which participants gave invisibility judgments are then
treated as those where the critical stimulus was “subliminal” or “unconscious,”
as opposed to trials with higher visibility ratings. Sometimes, only these
trials are further analyzed, for instance, for unconscious priming effects. Here
I argue that this practice requires implicit … Show more
“…While the validity of subjective reports is subject to some controversy (Schmidt, ), a recent integrative research article that accepts the subjective report criterion has summarized the available data concluding that “discrimination performance is typically better on seen than on unseen trials, even when the physical stimuli are physically identical” (King & Dehaene, , p. 2, italics added). As the authors further state.…although objective discrimination can be above chance with subjectively invisible stimuli, such unconscious discrimination performance is at best mediocre.…”
Section: Tipping the Balance For Overflowmentioning
The question of whether conscious experience is restricted by cognitive access and exhausted by report, or whether it overflows it—comprising more information than can be reported—is hotly debated. Recently, we provided evidence in favor of Overflow, showing that observers discriminated the color‐diversity (CD) of letters in an array, while their working‐memory and attention were dedicated to encoding and reporting a set of cued letters. An alternative interpretation is that CD‐discriminations do not entail conscious experience of the underlying colors. Here we argue, based on conceptual considerations and consistency with neuroscience and phenomenology, in favor of the Overflow interpretation.
“…While the validity of subjective reports is subject to some controversy (Schmidt, ), a recent integrative research article that accepts the subjective report criterion has summarized the available data concluding that “discrimination performance is typically better on seen than on unseen trials, even when the physical stimuli are physically identical” (King & Dehaene, , p. 2, italics added). As the authors further state.…although objective discrimination can be above chance with subjectively invisible stimuli, such unconscious discrimination performance is at best mediocre.…”
Section: Tipping the Balance For Overflowmentioning
The question of whether conscious experience is restricted by cognitive access and exhausted by report, or whether it overflows it—comprising more information than can be reported—is hotly debated. Recently, we provided evidence in favor of Overflow, showing that observers discriminated the color‐diversity (CD) of letters in an array, while their working‐memory and attention were dedicated to encoding and reporting a set of cued letters. An alternative interpretation is that CD‐discriminations do not entail conscious experience of the underlying colors. Here we argue, based on conceptual considerations and consistency with neuroscience and phenomenology, in favor of the Overflow interpretation.
“…Although introspective judgments of perception have face validity (Cleeremans, 2011), it is also clear that a self-reported lack of perception may not indicate an actual lack of perception but rather a lack of confidence (Holender, 1986; Björkman et al, 1993; Wiens, 2007). This may be especially problematic when self-reports are used in isolation to divide trials into conscious and unconscious bins (Schmidt, 2015). In the absence of a consensus on how to measure perception, it is therefore important to compare effects based on both types of measures.…”
A new paradigm for investigating whether a cognitive process is independent of perception was recently suggested. In the paradigm, primes are shown at an intermediate signal strength that leads to trial-to-trial and inter-individual variability in prime perception. Here, I used this paradigm and an objective measure of perception to assess the influence of prime identification responses on Stroop priming. I found that sensory states producing correct and incorrect prime identification responses were also associated with qualitatively different priming effects. Incorrect prime identification responses were associated with reversed priming effects but in contrast to previous studies, I interpret this to result from the (mis-)perception of primes rather than from a subliminal process. Furthermore, the intermediate signal strength also produced inter-individual variability in prime perception that strongly influenced priming effects: only participants who on average perceived the primes were Stroop primed. I discuss how this new paradigm, with a wide range of d′ values, is more appropriate when regression analysis on inter-individual identification performance is used to investigate perception-dependent processing. The results of this study, in line with previous results, suggest that drawing conclusions about subliminal processes based on data averaged over individuals may be unwarranted.
“…Previous studies have pointed out the limitations of using accuracy and confidence measures to assess perceptual awareness, and suggested remedies including the calculation of metacognitive sensitivity measures (25), Bayesian statistics (26), or parametric variation of the experimental manipulation (27). The present study addresses an issue not covered in previous discussions, by showing Notably, a previous study (10) that used CFS to investigate acquisition of threat responses without awareness of the stimuli found that such acquisition can occur, but is rapidly forgotten.…”
1In an ever-changing environment, survival depends on learning which stimuli represent threat, 2 and also on updating such associations when circumstances shift. Humans can acquire 3 physiological responses to threat-associated stimuli even when they are unaware of them, but the 4 role of awareness in updating threat contingencies remains unknown. This complex process -5 generating novel responses while simultaneously suppressing learned ones -relies on distinct 6 neural mechanisms from initial learning, and has only been shown with awareness. Can it occur 7 unconsciously? Here we show that it can. Participants underwent classical threat conditioning to 8 visual stimuli that were suppressed from their awareness. One of two images was paired with an 9 electric shock; halfway through the experiment, contingencies were reversed and the shock was 10 paired with the other image. We found that physiological responses reflected changes in 11 stimulus-threat pairings independently of stimulus awareness, demonstrating the sophistication 12 of unconscious affective flexibility. 13 14 However, it is highly unlikely that across participants, random noise would yield consistent (and 132
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