Consciousness for perception and for action: A perspective from unconscious binding

2016 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhicheng Lin

AbstractI argue that the scope and strength of unconscious perception have been overestimated in extant theories. I describe an unconscious binding perspective, and how in conjunction with rigorous methodology it can guide the delineation of unconscious processing. Under this perspective, the function of consciousness is to increase the saliency of conscious contents by facilitating the deployment of focal attention.

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 171783 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tarryn Balsdon ◽  
Colin W. G. Clifford

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.


2010 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 193-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Norman

A series of vignette examples taken from psychological research on motivation, emotion, decision making, and attitudes illustrates how the influence of unconscious processes is often measured in a range of different behaviors. However, the selected studies share an apparent lack of explicit operational definition of what is meant by consciousness, and there seems to be substantial disagreement about the properties of conscious versus unconscious processing: Consciousness is sometimes equated with attention, sometimes with verbal report ability, and sometimes operationalized in terms of behavioral dissociations between different performance measures. Moreover, the examples all seem to share a dichotomous view of conscious and unconscious processes as being qualitatively different. It is suggested that cognitive research on consciousness can help resolve the apparent disagreement about how to define and measure unconscious processing, as is illustrated by a selection of operational definitions and empirical findings from modern cognitive psychology. These empirical findings also point to the existence of intermediate states of conscious awareness, not easily classifiable as either purely conscious or purely unconscious. Recent hypotheses from cognitive psychology, supplemented with models from social, developmental, and clinical psychology, are then presented all of which are compatible with the view of consciousness as a graded rather than an all-or-none phenomenon. Such a view of consciousness would open up for explorations of intermediate states of awareness in addition to more purely conscious or purely unconscious states and thereby increase our understanding of the seemingly “unconscious” aspects of mental life.


2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shane Pitts ◽  
Mark R. Klinger

1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Bernat ◽  
Scott Bunce ◽  
Howard Shevrin ◽  
Stephen Hibbard ◽  
Mike Snodgrass

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Dominik Guss ◽  
Jarrett Evans ◽  
Devon Murray ◽  
Harald Schaub

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