Deduction without awareness

We investigated whether two basic forms of deductive inference, Modus Ponens and Disjunctive Syllogism, occur automatically and without awareness. In Experiment 1, we used a priming paradigm with a set of conditional and disjunctive problems. For each trial, two premises were shown. The second premise was presented at a rate designed to be undetectable. After each problem, participants had to evaluate whether a newly-presented target number was odd or even. The target number matched or did not match a conclusion endorsed by the two previous premises. We found that when the target matched the conclusion of a Modus Ponens inference, the evaluation of the target number was reliably faster than baseline even when participants reported that they were not aware of the second premise. This priming effect did not occur for any other valid or invalid inference that we tested, including the Disjunctive Syllogism. In Experiment 2, we used a forced-choice paradigm in which we found that some participants were able to access some information on the second premise when their attention was explicitly directed to it. In Experiment 3, we showed that the priming effect for Modus Ponens was present also in subjects who could not access any information about P(2). In Experiment 4 we explored whether spatial relations (e.g., "a before b") or sentences with quantifiers (e.g., "all a with b") could generate a priming effect similar to the one observed for Modus Ponens. A priming effect could be found for Modus Ponens only, but not for the other relations tested. These findings show that the Modus Ponens inference, in contrast to other deductive inferences, can be carried out automatically and unconsciously. Furthermore, our findings suggest that critical deductive inference schemata can be included in the range of high-level cognitive activities that are carried out unconsciously.     

Sequences learned without awareness can orient attention during the perception of human activity

Human activity contains sequential dependencies that observers may use to structure a task environment (e.g., the ordering of steps when tying shoes or getting into a car). Two experiments investigated how people take advantage of sequential structure to understand activity and respond to behaviorally relevant events. Participants monitored animations of simplified human movement to identify target hand gestures. In the first experiment, participants were able to use predictive sequential dependencies to more quickly identify targets. In addition, performance was best at the point in time that followed the sequence. However, the second experiment revealed that how sequential structure affects detection depends on whether the sequence predicts the timing of target events. In all cases, sequence learning was observed without participants’ awareness of the sequential dependencies. These results suggest that human activity sequences can be learned without awareness and can be used to adaptively guide behavior.     

Attention without awareness: Attentional modulation of perceptual grouping without awareness

Perceptual grouping is the process through which the perceptual system combines local stimuli into a more global perceptual unit. Previous studies have shown attention to be a modulatory factor for perceptual grouping. However, these studies mainly used explicit measurements, and, thus, whether attention can modulate perceptual grouping without awareness is still relatively unexplored. To clarify the relationship between attention and perceptual grouping, the present study aims to explore how attention interacts with perceptual grouping without awareness. The task was to judge the relative lengths of two centrally presented horizontal bars while a railway-shaped pattern defined by color similarity was presented in the background. Although the observers were unaware of the railway-shaped pattern, their line-length judgment was biased by that pattern, which induced a Ponzo illusion, indicating grouping without awareness. More importantly, an attentional modulatory effect without awareness was manifested as evident by the observer’s performance being more often biased when the railway-shaped pattern was formed by an attended color than when it was formed by an unattended one. Also, the attentional modulation effect was shown to be dynamic, being more pronounced with a short presentation time than a longer one. The results of the present study not only clarify the relationship between attention and perceptual grouping but also further contribute to our understanding of attention and awareness by corroborating the dissociation between attention and awareness.

     

Recollection can be weak and familiarity can be strong

The remember-know procedure is widely used to investigate recollection and familiarity in recognition memory, but almost all of the results obtained with that procedure can be readily accommodated by a unidimensional model based on signal-detection theory. The unidimensional model holds that remember judgments reflect strong memories (associated with high confidence, high accuracy, and fast reaction times), whereas know judgments reflect weaker memories (associated with lower confidence, lower accuracy, and slower reaction times). Although this is invariably true on average, a new 2-dimensional account (the continuous dual-process model) suggests that remember judgments made with low confidence should be associated with lower old-new accuracy but higher source accuracy than know judgments made with high confidence. We tested this prediction--and found evidence to support it--using a modified remember-know procedure in which participants were first asked to indicate a degree of recollection-based or familiarity-based confidence for each word presented on a recognition test and were then asked to recollect the color (red or blue) and screen location (top or bottom) associated with the word at study. For familiarity-based decisions, old-new accuracy increased with old-new confidence, but source accuracy did not (suggesting that stronger old-new memory was supported by higher degrees of familiarity). For recollection-based decisions, both old-new accuracy and source accuracy increased with old-new confidence (suggesting that stronger old-new memory was supported by higher degrees of recollection). These findings suggest that recollection and familiarity are continuous processes and that participants can indicate which process mainly contributed to their recognition decisions.     

Selection can be performed effectively without temporal binding,but could be even more effective with it

Experiments using spatial cues and spatial probes provide strong evidence for an attention mechanism that chooses a location and selects all information at that location. This selection process can work very quickly; so quickly that selection probably begins before segmentation and grouping. It can be implemented in a neural network simply and efficiently without temporal binding. In conjunction with this spatial attention, however, temporal binding can potentially enhance visual selection in complex scenes. First, it would allow a target object to be selected without also selecting a superimposed distractor. Second, it could maintain representations of objects after attention has moved to another object. Third, it could allow multiple parts of an object or scene to be selected, segmented, and analysed simultaneously. Thus, temporal synchrony should be more likely to appear during tasks with overlapping targets and distractors, and tasks that require that multiple objects or multipart objects be analysed and remembered simultaneously.     

Specificity of face processing without awareness

The recognition memory for inverted faces is especially difficult when compared with that for non-face stimuli. This face inversion effect has often been used as a marker of face-specific holistic processing. However, whether face processing without awareness is still specific remains unknown. The present study addressed this issue by examining the face inversion effect with the technique of binocular rivalry. Results showed that invisible upright faces could break suppression faster than invisible inverted faces. Nevertheless, no difference was found for invisible upright houses and invisible inverted houses. This suggested that face processing without awareness is still specific. Some face-specific information can be processed by high-level brain areas even when that information is invisible.     

Implicit and explicit memory without awareness

Summary Three experiments are reported which investigate the conscious status of subjects during an implicit-memory test. In all experiments the subjects either named each visually presented target item or generated each item from an anagram in a first phase of incidental learning. In a second phase, they were either given a visual word-stem completion task as an implicit-memory test or given a recognition task (Experiment 1), or a cued-recall task (Experiments 2 and 3) as explicit-memory tests. Finally, in a third phase the subjects were required to make decisions about the input status (i. e., they had to decide whether the item was present in the first phase) as well as about the output status of information (i. e., they had to decide whether the item had been completed, recognized or recalled in the second phase). A generation effect (i. e., generated items were remembered better than named items) was evident in the recognition and recall data, but only for items whose recognition or recall was accompanied by conscious recollection of their previous occurrence in the study list. Judgments about the input status were more precise, given that items had been consciously recognized or recalled rather than completed. The same pattern of findings was observed for judgments about the output status. The results are interpreted as evidence that subjects in implicit-memory tests are less aware of the fact that some of their productions are relevant to prior experiences. In addition, they are less aware of the fact that they are retrieving information from their memories. However, the same state of nonawareness may be present in explicit-memory tests, as was revealed by the performance of subjects on those items whose recognition or recall was not accompanied by conscious recollection.     

False recognition and perception without awareness

Jacoby and Whitehouse (1989) demonstrated that the probability of calling new test words "old" (i.e., false recognition) is biased by context words. When context words were briefly exposed and subjects were not informed of their presence, new words were called "old" more often if the context and test words were identical than if the context and test words were different. When the context words were presented at longer exposure durations and subjects were informed of their presence, the opposite pattern of results occurred. In Experiment 1, we replicated the critical qualitative difference across conditions reported by Jacoby and Whitehouse. In addition, the combined results of Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that the exposure duration of the context words, and not the instructions to the subjects, is the primary factor determining which pattern of false recognition occurs. However, in contrast with the findings of Jacoby and Whitehouse, both patterns of false recognition were associated with significant recognition memory for the context words. The latter finding presents problems for any interpretation of false recognition, which implies that the briefly exposed context words are perceived without awareness.     

Appearances can be deceiving

Conclusion I began by claiming that I simply wanted to undermine the plausibility of the appeal to appearances in matters of perceptual belief. Most of the arguments I have offered, however, have been more strongly stated, viz., I have apparently tried to eliminate them rather than simply render them less credible. But the notion of appearances is deeply entrenched, so much so that simply undermining their credibility may require overstating the case somewhat. The central theme of the above arguments is that appealing to appearances misleads us. The appeal misleads us into giving the wrong sorts of explanation, both with respect to the psychology of perceptual belief formation and the justification of perceptual beliefs. In short, appearances can be deceiving. And they probably are.A distant (if now unrecognizable) ancestor of this paper was first read at the 12th Annual Louisiana Philosophy Convention in October, 1988. Steve Fuller also offered comments on an intermediate version. I am especially grateful to Norton Nelkin who has read and commented on several versions. He should not be held complicit, however.     

Numbers can be enriching

Numbers are words with distinctive properties that give them a special and important place in scholarly discourse in psychology. Among these are the ability to say the same thing to everybody, the stability of their meaning across time, and their manipulability. These properties make quantitative methods valuable tools in enriching research (research aimed at giving people a deeper, broader, more profound appreciation of the phenomenon) as well as in theory-building research (research aimed at improving a unified and coherent understanding). These views seem compatible with those advanced by Westerman [Westerman, M.A., 2006. Quantitative research as an interpretive enterprise: The mostly unacknowledged role of interpretation in research efforts and suggestions for explicitly interpretive quantitative investigations. New Ideas in Psychology, 24, 189-211] and Yanchar [Yanchar, S.C., 2006. On the possibility of contextual-quantitative inquiry. New Ideas in Psychology, 24, 212-228].     

Compatibilism can be natural

Compatibilism is the view that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism. Natural compatibilism is the view that in ordinary social cognition, people are compatibilists. Researchers have recently debated whether natural compatibilism is true. This paper presents six experiments (N = 909) that advance this debate. The results provide the best evidence to date for natural compatibilism, avoiding the main methodological problems faced by previous work supporting the view. In response to simple scenarios about familiar activities, people judged that agents had moral responsibilities to perform actions that they were unable to perform (Experiment 1), were morally responsible for unavoidable outcomes (Experiment 2), were to blame for unavoidable outcomes (Experiments 3–4), deserved blame for unavoidable outcomes (Experiment 5), and should suffer consequences for unavoidable outcomes (Experiment 6). These findings advance our understanding of moral psychology and philosophical debates that depend partly on patterns in commonsense morality.     

Context-dependent brightness priming occurs without visual awareness

Our visual systems account for stimulus context in brightness perception, but whether such adjustments occur for stimuli that we are unaware of has not been established. We therefore assessed whether stimulus context influences brightness processing by measuring unconscious priming with metacontrast masking. When a middle-gray disk was presented on a darker (or brighter) background, such that it could be consciously perceived as brighter (or darker) via simultaneous brightness contrast (SBC), reaction times were significantly faster to a bright (or dark) annulus than to a dark (or bright) annulus. We further show that context-dependent brightness priming does not correlate with visibility using an objective measure of awareness (Experiment 1) and that context-dependent, but not context-independent brightness priming, occurs equally strongly for stimuli below or above the subjective threshold for awareness (Experiment 2). These results suggest that SBC occurs at early levels of visual input and is not influenced by conscious perception.     

Temporal structure coding with and without awareness

In order to interpret a constantly changing environment, visual events far apart in space and time must be integrated into a unified percept. While spatial properties of invisible signals are known to be encoded without awareness, the fate of temporal properties remains largely unknown. Here, we probed temporal integration for two distinct motion stimuli that were either visible or rendered invisible using continuous flash suppression. We found that when invisible, both the direction of apparent motion and the gender of point-light walkers were processed only when defined across short time periods (i.e., respectively 100 ms and 1000 ms). This limitation was not observed under full visibility. These similar findings at two different hierarchical levels of processing suggest that temporal integration windows shrink in the absence of perceptual awareness. We discuss this phenomenon as a key prediction of the global neuronal workspace and the information integration theories of consciousness.     

Another look at semantic priming without awareness

In a recent study, McCauley, Parmelee, Sperber, and Carr (1980) reported results indicating that semantic priming had been produced by visual stimuli that were backward masked at durations too brief for greater than chance report. The conclusions drawn from such an experiment are critically dependent upon whether or not the primes were actually masked below the thresh-old for identification during priming trials. The three experiments reported here provide evidence that this requirement was not met. Rather, McCauley et al.’s (1980) methodology allowed for an uncontrolled increase in light adaptation during the actual testing of prime efficacy in the priming session. This increase in light adaptation reduced the effectiveness of the backward mask and resulted in an increase in prime visibility during priming trials. Thus, semantic priming probably occurred under conditions in which commensurate visual information was actually available.