Abstract
Unconscious perception, or perception without awareness, describes a situation where an observer's behaviour is influenced by a stimulus of which they have no phenomenal awareness. Perception without awareness is often claimed on the basis of a difference in thresholds for tasks that do and do not require awareness, for example, detecting the stimulus (requiring awareness) and making accurate judgements about the stimulus (based on unconscious processing). Although a difference in thresholds would be expected if perceptual evidence were processed without awareness, such a difference does not necessitate that this is actually occurring: a difference in thresholds can also arise from response bias, or through task differences. Here we ask instead whether the pattern of performance could be obtained if the observer were aware of the evidence used in making their decisions. A backwards masking paradigm was designed using digits as target stimuli, with difficulty controlled by the time between target and mask. Performance was measured over three tasks: detection, graphic discrimination and semantic discrimination. Despite finding significant differences in thresholds measured using proportion correct, and in observer sensitivity, modelling suggests that these differences were not the result of perception without awareness. That is, the observer was not relying solely on unconscious information to make decisions.
Highlights
IntroductionWhen we adjust the vergence of our eyes to bring into focus objects at different distances from ourselves, we are rarely aware of the small movement of the eyes, nor of the complex trigonometry that would allow for this correction
The brain does a lot of work that goes unacknowledged by conscious awareness
The typical pattern was for best performance in the graphic discrimination task, followed by the semantic discrimination task and the detection task, as shown in figure 3
Summary
When we adjust the vergence of our eyes to bring into focus objects at different distances from ourselves, we are rarely aware of the small movement of the eyes, nor of the complex trigonometry that would allow for this correction. This is as unremarkable as the fact that we are blissfully unaware of the everyday affairs of our kidneys. Perceptual processing of a stimulus can occur even when the phenomenal visibility of that stimulus is limited to the point
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