Measuring consciousness: Is one measure better than the other?

Sandberg, Kristian; Timmermans, Bert; Overgaard, Morten; Cleeremans, Axel

doi:10.1016/j.concog.2009.12.013

Cited by 401 publications

(412 citation statements)

References 22 publications

(30 reference statements)

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“…Importantly, in respect of subjective visibility, we are following what is now a large body of literature that probes the strength of conscious experience using such measures (e.g., Lamy, et al, 2008;Overgaard, Rote, Mouridsen, & Ramsoy, 2006;Sergent & Dehaene, 2004) including carefully considered comparisons of different scales (Sandberg, Timmermans, Overgaard, & Cleeremans, 2010). Of most significance, participants seem to use the scales consistently, with little evidence of confusion on their part.…”

Section: Subjective Visibility Measurementioning

confidence: 99%

The experiential blink: Mapping the cost of working memory encoding onto conscious perception in the attentional blink

Pincham

Bowman

Szűcs

2016

Cortex

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The attentional blink (AB) represents a cognitive deficit in reporting the second of two targets (T2), when that second target appears 200-600msec after the first (T1). However, it is unclear how this paradigm impacts the subjective visibility (that is, the conscious perception) of T2, and whether the temporal profile of T2 report accuracy matches the temporal profile of subjective visibility. In order to compare report accuracy and subjective visibility, we asked participants to identify T1 and T2, and to rate the subjective visibility of T2 across two experiments. Event-related potentials were also measured. The results revealed different profiles for the report of T2 versus the subjective visibility of T2, particularly when T1 and T2 appeared within 200msec of one another. Specifically, T2 report accuracy was high but T2 visibility was low when the two targets appeared in close temporal succession, suggesting what we call the Experiential Blink is different from the classic AB. Electrophysiologically, at lag-1, the P3 component was modulated more by subjective visibility than by report accuracy. Collectively, the data indicate that the deficit in accurately reporting T2 is not the same as the deficit in subjectively experiencing T2. This suggests that traditional understandings of the AB may require adjustment and that, consistent with other findings, working memory encoding and conscious perception may not be synonymous.

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Section: Subjective Visibility Measurementioning

confidence: 99%

The experiential blink: Mapping the cost of working memory encoding onto conscious perception in the attentional blink

Pincham

Bowman

Szűcs

2016

Cortex

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“…Using a modified version of the perceptual awareness scale (Sandberg, Timmermans, Overgaard, & Cleeremans, 2010), participants rated the clarity with which they had experienced the lexical stimulus, choosing from the levels 'No Text', 'Blurry Text', 'Almost Clear Text' and 'Absolutely Clear Text' (which were assigned numerical values of 0 to 3, respectively, in our analysis).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The importance of awareness for understanding language

Rabagliati¹,

Robertson²,

Carmel³

2016

Preprint

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Is consciousness required for high level cognitive processes, or can the unconscious mind perform tasks that are as complex and difficult as, for example, understanding a sentence? Recent work has argued that, yes, the unconscious mind can: Sklar et al. (2012) found that sentences, masked from consciousness using the technique of continuous flash suppression (CFS), broke into awareness more rapidly when their meanings were more unusual or more emotionally negative, even though processing the sentences’ meaning required unconsciously combining each word’s meaning. This has motivated the important claim that consciousness plays little-to-no functional role in high-level cognitive operations. Here, we aimed to replicate and extend these findings, but instead, across 10 high-powered studies, we found no evidence that the meaning of a phrase or word could be understood without awareness. We did, however, consistently find evidence that low-level perceptual features, such as sentence length and familiarity of alphabet, could be processed unconsciously. Our null findings for sentence processing are corroborated by a meta-analysis that aggregates our studies with the prior literature. We offer a potential explanation for prior positive results through a set of computational simulations, which show how the distributional characteristics of this type of CFS data, in particular its skew and heavy tail, can cause an elevated level of false positive results when common data exclusion criteria are applied. Our findings thus have practical implication for analyzing such data. More importantly, they suggest that consciousness may well be required for high-level cognitive tasks such as understanding language.

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“…Participants subsequently selected a colour from a 30×12 colour palette and then judged their colour experience "What was your COLOUR experience when you saw the symbol?" using the Perceptual Awareness Scale (PAS; Sandberg, Timmermans, Overgaard, & Cleeremans, 2010), a four-point likert-type measure (1: "No experience"; 2: "Brief glimpse"; 3: "Almost clear image"; and 4: "Absolutely clear image"). Participants had unlimited time for the colour selection and experience judgment.…”

Section: Grapheme-colour Associationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A placebo-controlled investigation of synaesthesia-like experiences under LSD

et al. 2016

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The induction of synaesthesia in non-synaesthetes has the potential to illuminate the mechanisms that contribute to the development of this condition and the shaping of its phenomenology. Previous research suggests that lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) reliably induces synaesthesia-like experiences in nonsynaesthetes. However, these studies suffer from a number of methodological limitations including lack of a placebo control and the absence of rigorous measures used to test established criteria for genuine synaesthesia. Here we report a pilot study that aimed to circumvent these limitations. We conducted a within-groups placebo-controlled investigation of the impact of LSD on colour experiences in response to standardized graphemes and sounds and the consistency and specificity of grapheme-and sound-colour associations. Participants reported more spontaneous synaesthesia-like experiences under LSD, relative to placebo, but did not differ across conditions in colour experiences in response to inducers, consistency of stimulus-colour associations, or in inducer specificity. Further analyses suggest that individual differences in a number of these effects were associated with the propensity to experience states of absorption in one's daily life. Although preliminary, the present study suggests that LSD-induced synaesthesia-like experiences do not exhibit consistency or inducer-specificity and thus do not meet two widely established criteria for genuine synaesthesia.

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Measuring consciousness: Is one measure better than the other?

Cited by 401 publications

References 22 publications

The experiential blink: Mapping the cost of working memory encoding onto conscious perception in the attentional blink

The experiential blink: Mapping the cost of working memory encoding onto conscious perception in the attentional blink

The importance of awareness for understanding language

A placebo-controlled investigation of synaesthesia-like experiences under LSD

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