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Partial awareness distinguishes between conscious perception and conscious: Reply to Dienes & Seth

par Timmermans, Bert ;Sandberg, Kristian;Cleeremans, Axel ;Overgaard, Morten
Référence Consciousness and cognition, 19, page (1081-1083)
Publication Publié, 2010

Article révisé par les pairs

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Résumé :

When evaluating a measure of awareness, two parameters are of key importance: exhaustiveness and exclusiveness (Reingold & Merikle, 1988). A measure is maximally exhaustive when it detects all conscious knowledge, and it is maximally exclusive when no unconscious knowledge is misclassified as conscious knowledge. In the study of Sandberg, Timmermans, Overgaard, and Cleeremans (2010), we tested three measures of awareness and concluded that since the Perceptual Aware- ness Scale (PAS) was the most sensitive measure, it was also the most exhaustive one, based on the fact that all three mea- sures were equally exclusive. In their comment on the study, Dienes and Seth (2010) dispute the paper’s conclusion, arguing that asking participants to report on their visual experience in general instead of on their confidence in having responded correctly incurs the risk of misclassifying unconscious information as conscious. In other words, the higher sensitivity of PAS that Sandberg et al. (2010) observed is a consequence of the scale’s weak exclusiveness rather than of its better exhaus- tiveness. According to Dienes and Seth, this is because PAS may reflect conscious contents that are irrelevant to performing the task. They write, ‘‘according to higher order thought theory, the content p of a mental state is conscious only if the par- ticipant is aware of the mental state as having content p (cf. Rosenthal, 2005). If one saw a square but was only aware of seeing a flash of something, then one has not consciously seen a square.” In this reply, we claim that there is a difference between conscious visual experience, which may be partial, and the resulting conscious content, which is conceptual and, at least in the sort of experimental paradigm we have used, dichotomous. Whereas PAS measures the first, confidence judg- ments and post-decision wagering measure the second, as such content forms the basis of participants’ judgment knowledge.