Can No-Report Paradigms Extract True Correlates of Consciousness?

Abstract

In a recent Trends in Cognitive Sciences article, Tsuchiya et al. discuss how ‘no-report paradigms’ may be an important methodological remedy to isolate neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) [1]. The article reflects the still ongoing attempt for consciousness research to answer its fundamental methodological question: how one can measure subjective experiences that are directly available only to the person having them. It was argued that experiments in which participants give a subjective report as a measure of consciousness are confounded by neural events relating to metacognitive/introspective access to the conscious state and accordingly are more unreliable than experiments without reporting.