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

Semantic activation in the absence of perceptual awareness

Participants performed a semantic categorization task on a target that was preceded by a prime word belonging either to the same category (20% of trials) or to a different category (80% of trials). The prime was presented for 33 msec and followed either immediately or after a delay by a pattern mask. With the immediate mask, reaction times (RTs) were shorter on related than on unrelated trials. This facilitatory priming reached significance at prime-target stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 400 msec or less and remained unaffected by task practice. With the delayed mask, RTs were longer on related than on unrelated trials. This reversed (strategic) semantic priming proved to be significant (1) only at a prime-target SOA of 400 msec or longer and (2) after the participants had some practice with the task. The present findings provide further evidence that perceiving a stimulus with and without phenomenological awareness can lead to qualitatively different behavioral consequences

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

Embodied appearance properties and subjectivity

The traditional approach in cognitive sciences holds that cognition is a matter of manipulating abstract symbols followingcertain rules. According to this view, the body is merely an input/output device, which allows the computationalsystem—the brain—to acquire new input data by means of the senses and to act in the environment following its com-mands. In opposition to this classical view, defenders of embodied cognition (EC) stress the relevance of the body inwhich the cognitive agent is embedded in their explanation of cognitive processes. From a representationalist frameworkregarding our conscious experience, in this article, I will offer a novel argument in favor of EC and show that cognitionconstitutively—and no merely causally—depends upon body activity beyond that in the brain. In particular, I will arguethat in order to solve the problem derived from the empirical evidence in favor of the possibility of shifted spectrum,representationalist should endorse the view that experiences concern its subject: the content of experience isde se.Ishow that this claim perfectly matches the phenomenological observation and helps explaining the subjective characterof the experience. Furthermore, I argue that entertaining this kind of representation constitutively depends on bodilyactivity. Consequently, insofar as cognition depends on consciousness, it is embodied