163 research outputs found
Concepts of visual consciousness and their measurement.
Although visual consciousness can be manipulated easily (e.g., by visual
masking), it is unresolved whether it can be assessed accurately with behavioral
measures such as discrimination ability and self-report. Older theories of
visual consciousness postulated a sensory threshold and distinguished between
subjective and objective thresholds. In contrast, newer theories distinguish
among three aspects: phenomenal, access, and reflexive consciousness. This
review shows that discrimination ability and self-report differ in their
sensitivity to these aspects. Therefore, both need to be assessed in the study
of visual consciousness
Dos and don’ts in response priming research
Response priming is a well-understood but sparsely employed paradigm in cognitive
science. The method is powerful and well-suited for exploring early visuomotor
processing in a wide range of tasks and research fields. Moreover, response
priming can be dissociated from visual awareness, possibly because it is based
on the first sweep of feedforward processing of primes and targets. This makes
it a theoretically interesting device for separating conscious and unconscious
vision. We discuss the major opportunities of the paradigm and give specific
recommendations (e.g., tracing the time-course of priming in parametric
experiments). Also, we point out typical confounds, design flaws, and data
processing artifacts
Subliminal Semantic Priming in Speech
Numerous studies have reported subliminal repetition and semantic priming in the visual modality. We transferred this paradigm to the auditory modality. Prime awareness was manipulated by a reduction of sound intensity level. Uncategorized prime words (according to a post-test) were followed by semantically related, unrelated, or repeated target words (presented without intensity reduction) and participants performed a lexical decision task (LDT). Participants with slower reaction times in the LDT showed semantic priming (faster reaction times for semantically related compared to unrelated targets) and negative repetition priming (slower reaction times for repeated compared to semantically related targets). This is the first report of semantic priming in the auditory modality without conscious categorization of the prime
Subliminal Semantic Priming in Speech
Numerous studies have reported subliminal repetition and semantic priming in the visual modality. We transferred this paradigm to the auditory modality. Prime awareness was manipulated by a reduction of sound intensity level. Uncategorized prime words (according to a post-test) were followed by semantically related, unrelated, or repeated target words (presented without intensity reduction) and participants performed a lexical decision task (LDT). Participants with slower reaction times in the LDT showed semantic priming (faster reaction times for semantically related compared to unrelated targets) and negative repetition priming (slower reaction times for repeated compared to semantically related targets). This is the first report of semantic priming in the auditory modality without conscious categorization of the prime
The Spatial and Temporal Construction of Confidence in the Visual Scene
Human subjects can report many items of a cluttered field a few hundred milliseconds after stimulus presentation. This memory decays rapidly and after a second only 3 or 4 items can be stored in working memory. Here we compared the dynamics of objective performance with a measure of subjective report and we observed that 1) Objective performance beyond explicit subjective reports (blindsight) was significantly more pronounced within a short temporal interval and within specific locations of the visual field which were robust across sessions 2) High confidence errors (false beliefs) were largely confined to a small spatial window neighboring the cue. The size of this window did not change in time 3) Subjective confidence showed a moderate but consistent decrease with time, independent of all other experimental factors. Our study allowed us to asses quantitatively the temporal and spatial access to an objective response and to subjective reports
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