Here, we explore the sensitivity of different awareness scales in revealing conscious reports on visual emotion perception. Participants were exposed to a backward masking task involving fearful faces and asked to rate their conscious awareness in perceiving emotion in facial expression using three different subjective measures: confidence ratings , with the conventional taxonomy of certainty, the perceptual awareness scale , through which participants categorize “raw” visual experience, and post-decision wagering , which involves economic categorization. Our results show that the CR (...) measure was the most exhaustive and the most graded. In contrast, the PAS and PDW measures suggested instead that consciousness of emotional stimuli is dichotomous. Possible explanations of the inconsistency were discussed. Finally, our results also indicate that PDW biases awareness ratings by enhancing first-order accuracy of emotion perception. This effect was possibly a result of higher motivation induced by monetary incentives. (shrink)

Comparison of behavioural measures of consciousness has attracted much attention recently. In a recent article, Szczepanowski et al. conclude that confidence ratings predict accuracy better than both the perceptual awareness scale and post-decision wagering when using stimuli with emotional content . Although we find the study interesting, we disagree with the conclusion that CR is superior to PAS because of two methodological issues. First, the conclusion is not based on a formal test. We performed this test and found no evidence (...) that CR predicted accuracy better than PAS . Second, Szczepanowski et al. used the present version of PAS in a manner somewhat different from how it was originally intended, and the participants may not have been adequately instructed. We end our commentary with a set of recommendations for future studies using PAS. (shrink)

Both the multidimensional phenomenon and the polysemous notion of consciousness continue to prove resistant to consistent measurement and unambiguous definition. This is hardly surprising, given that there is no agreement even as regards the most fundamental issues they involve. One of the basic disagreements present in the continuing debate about consciousness pertains to its gradational nature. The general aim of this article is to show how consciousness might be graded and multidimensional at the same time. We therefore focus on the (...) question of what it is, exactly, that is or could be graded in cases of consciousness, and how we can measure it. Ultimately, four different gradable aspects of consciousness will be described: quality, abstractness, complexity and usefulness, which belong to four different dimensions, these being understood, respectively, as phenomenal, semantic, physiological, and functional. Consequently, consciousness may be said to vary with respect to phenomenal quality, semantic abstraction, physiological complexity, and functional usefulness. It is hoped that such a four-dimensional approach will help to clarify and justify claims about the hierarchical nature of consciousness. The approach also proves explanatorily advantageous, as it enables us not only to draw attention to certain new and important differences in respect of subjective measures of awareness and to justify how a given creature may be ranked higher in one dimension of consciousness and lower in terms of another, but also allows for innovative explanations of a variety of well-known phenomena (amongst these, the interpretations of blindsight and locked-in syndrome will be briefly outlined here). Moreover, a 4D framework makes possible many predictions and hypotheses that may be experimentally tested (We point out a few such possibilities pertaining to interdimensional dependencies). (shrink)

The time course of different metacognitive experiences of knowledge was investigated using artificial grammar learning. Experiment 1 revealed that when participants are aware of the basis of their judgments decisions are made most rapidly, followed by decisions made with conscious judgment but without conscious knowledge of underlying structure , and guess responses were made most slowly, even when controlling for differences in confidence and accuracy. In experiment 2, short response deadlines decreased the accuracy of unconscious but not conscious structural knowledge. (...) Conversely, the deadline decreased the proportion of conscious structural knowledge in favour of guessing. Unconscious structural knowledge can be applied rapidly but becomes more reliable with additional metacognitive processing time whereas conscious structural knowledge is an all-or-nothing response that cannot always be applied rapidly. These dissociations corroborate quite separate theories of recognition and metacognition. (shrink)

The ever-increasing precision of brain measurement brings with it a demand for more reliable and fine-grained measures of conscious experience. However, introspection has long been assumed to be too limited and fallible. This skepticism is primarily based on a series of classic psychological experiments, which suggested that more is seen than can be retrospectively reported , and that we can be easily fooled into retrospectively describing intentional choices that we have never made . However, the work by Petitmengin, Remillieux, Cahour, (...) and Carter-Thomas could resolve this dilemma. They showed that subjects can be interactively guided to become better aware of their past experience, thereby overturning the “choice blindness” results of Johansson et al. . Although some more fine-tuning of the experimental protocol is needed, interactively guided introspection may well become the most reliable and exhaustive measure of consciousness. (shrink)

Methodological problems of how awareness during learning should be measured have been extensively discussed and investigated in cognitive psychology. This review considers; 1)whether amnesics can perform implicit learning tasks at a similar level to normal controls, 2) whether differences in instructional orientations create dissociations in performance in tests of implicit and explicit knowledge, and 3) whether participants can retrospectively verbalise the learning outcomes. The paper concludes that; amnesics’ implicit learning abilities differ from the normal controls, instructions on implicit learning do (...) not guarantee the occurrence of implicit learning, and objective and subjective awareness measures used in the literature face inherent problems and so the awareness controversy remains unsettled. (shrink)

Despite various studies examining intertemporal choice with hypothetical rewards due to problematic real reward delivery, there remains no substantial evidence on the effect of the incentives on the decision confidence and cognitive process in intertemporal choice and no comprehensive exploration on the loss domain. Hence, this study conducts an eye-tracking experiment to examine the effect of incentive approach and measure participants' decision confidence using a between-subject design in both gain and loss domains. Results replicated previous findings which show incentives do (...) not affect intertemporal choice in the gain domain. In contrast, in the loss domain, participants in the incentivized group were more likely to choose the larger-later options than those in the non-incentivized group. Furthermore, the decision confidence and the mean fixation duration differed between the incentivized and non-incentivized groups in both gain and loss domains. These findings allow for a better understanding of the effect of incentives on intertemporal choice and provide valuable information for the design of incentives in future intertemporal experiments. (shrink)