One of the most important factors behind the flowering of consciousness studies in the latter part of the 20th century was the demonstration that stimulus detection and goal directed action can occur in the absence of any conscious awareness of the stimulus. This phenomenon is most striking in neurological patients such as GY, who can detect a moving stimulus that he cannot ‘see’ and DF, who can accurately grasp an object while being unaware of its shape. Similar phenomena can also be observed in people with intact brains. With appropriate presentation parameters, subjects can often ‘guess’ the presence identity of a stimulus better than chance, while claiming that they cannot ‘see’ the stimulus. Alternative the presence of an ‘unseen’ stimulus may interfere with the performance of some task by increasing errors and/or reaction time. These observations, now extended by brain imaging studies, define three levels of awareness. (1) The subject is fully aware of the stimulus. (2) The subject claims not to be aware of the stimulus, but can make guesses about the stimulus better than chance. (3) The subject claims not to be aware of the stimulus, guesses at chance levels, but nevertheless responds to the stimulus in terms of brain activity and/or behaviour. Level 2 is problematic because there is a discrepancy between the subject’s introspection (I am not aware of the stimulus) and his behaviour (guessing better than chance). A perfectly reasonable argument can be made that the ‘guessing’ performance indicates that the subject is ‘partially’ aware of the stimulus. The subject might claim not to be aware of the stimulus through a lack of confidence in these partial impressions. In terms of signal detection theory, the apparent threshold of awareness is determined, in part, by the criterion adopted by the subject for answering the question, ‘Did you see the stimulus?’ What these criteria might be and how they can be manipulated are, of course, key questions for the use of introspection in experimental studies. As Costal reminds us in his very entertaining account, the history of psychology is intimately bound up with the problem of introspection. The idea that such studies disappeared during the dark days of behaviourism is largely a myth. Nevertheless, after more than a century introspection remains the area of experimental psychology where the least progress has been made. Costal makes the key point that, for self-observation to be a viable component of experimental studies, we need to develop it as a shared social practice rather than something that is private. But what kind of a practice is introspection? Johansson et al. address this question by testing a classical idea in cognitive psychology, that we do not have 1st person access to psychological processes (problem solving, decision making, etc.) but only to the products of these processes. The implication of this belief is that, when people introspect about such processes, they are effectively making up a story. How can we tell when a respondent is making up a story in this way and when they are accurately reporting inner
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Nov 1, 2008
Denis Creissels 
Open Access