Perceiving a story outside of conscious awareness: When we infer narrative attributes from subliminal sequential stimuli

Perceiving a story behind successive movements plays an important role in our lives. From a general perspective, such higher mental activity would seem to depend on conscious processes. Using a subliminal priming paradigm, we demonstrated that such story perception occurs without conscious awareness. In the experiments, participants were subliminally presented with sequential pictures that represented a story in which one geometrical figure was chased by the other figure, and in which one fictitious character defeated the other character in a tug-of-war. Although the participants could not report having seen the pictures, their automatic mental associations (i.e., associations that are activated unintentionally, difficult to control, and not necessarily endorsed at a conscious level) were shifted to line up with the story. The results suggest that story perception operates outside of conscious awareness. Implications for research on the unconscious were also briefly discussed.     

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.

     

Cognitive phenomenology and conscious thought

How does mental content feature in conscious thought? I first argue that for a thought to be conscious the content of that thought must conscious, and that one has to appeal to cognitive phenomenology to give an adequate account of what it is for the content of a thought to be conscious. Sensory phenomenology cannot do the job. If one claims that the content of a conscious thought is unconscious, one is really claiming that there is no such thing as conscious thought. So one must either accept that there is such a thing as cognitive phenomenology, or deny the existence of conscious thought. Once it is clear that conscious thought requires cognitive phenomenology, there is a pressing question about the exact relationship between a thought’s cognitive phenomenological properties and its content. I conclude with a discussion of the nature of this relationship.     

Subjective awareness scale length influences the prevalence,not the presence,of graded conscious states

There is an ongoing debate about the graded or dichotomous form of visual consciousness. Studies involved in the disagreement have typically employed subjective awareness ratings in psychophysical experiments. Variations in scale length have made comparisons across studies difficult and have even been suspected of influencing conclusions about the form of consciousness. We tested the proposal that a 21-point awareness scale produces dichotomous awareness state reports. The experiment described in this article randomly assigned participants to use one of four scale lengths used in previous studies in a backward masking task. Our findings suggest that all scales indicate the presence of graded awareness states, but that the resulting proportion of degraded state reports differed across the scales. Consequently, we argue that the decision of whether the form of consciousness observed in a given study is dichotomous or graded is dependent on an interpretation of the relative degree of degradation.     

谈项安世易学对吴澄的影响

宋代项安世著《周易玩辞》一书,主张“因辞而测象”的治易路数,其学术风格兼重象数和义理。项氏《周易玩辞》一书,对元代吴澄产生了很大影响。吴澄的易学思路,基本也遵循“观象玩辞”的路数进行,其易学著作《易纂言》多处提及并肯定项氏观点。但吴澄没有在项氏的观点面前止步,在易象内涵、卦变理论和义理的理解等方面,表现出与项氏易学不同的特点。     

Nietzsche on conscious and unconscious thought

ABSTRACT

While much recent attention has been directed towards Nietzsche’s reflections on the mind, and on consciousness in particular, his often-suggestive comments about thinking have thus far avoided comparable scrutiny. Starting from Nietzsche’s claims that we ‘think constantly, but [do] not know it’, and that only our conscious thinking ‘takes place in words,’ I draw out the distinct strands that underpin such remarks. The opening half of the paper focuses upon Nietzsche’s understanding of unconscious thinking, and the role of affects therein. In what remains, I consider the difference (for Nietzsche) between conscious and unconscious thought, with a particular focus on two important readings. The first, put forward by Paul Katsafanas, claims that conscious states alone have conceptually-articulated content. The second, defended most prominently by Mattia Riccardi, argues that Nietzsche’s various claims evince a form of HOT (higher-order thought) theory. I argue that neither reading is quite right, and instead propose an alternative interpretation of conscious thinking ‘in words’, which draws on work on inner speech.     

Implicit sequence learning and conscious awareness

This paper uses the Process Dissociation Procedure to explore whether people can acquire unconscious knowledge in the serial reaction time task [Destrebecqz, A., & Cleeremans, A. (2001). Can sequence learning be implicit? New evidence with the Process Dissociation Procedure. Psychonomic Bulletin &Review, 8, 343-350; Wilkinson, L., & Shanks, D. R. (2004). Intentional control and implicit sequence learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 30, 354-369]. Experiment 1 showed that people generated legal sequences above baseline levels under exclusion instructions. Reward moved exclusion performance towards baseline, indicating that the extent of motivation in the test phase influenced the expression of unconscious knowledge. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed that even with reward, adding noise to the sequences or shortening training led to above-baseline exclusion performance, suggesting that task difficulty and the amount of training also affected the expression of unconscious knowledge. The results help resolve some current debates about the role of conscious awareness in sequence learning.     

Cognitive control outside of conscious awareness

To test whether cognitive control can operate fully unconsciously on conflicts arising between two interfering subliminal stimuli, we designed a priming paradigm in which a subliminal reverse Color-Word Stroop item (a color word written on a congruent/incongruent color rectangle) preceded a supraliminal one in each trial. We found (a) a conflict adaptation effect, with a smaller reverse Stroop effect on the visible probe items after incongruent than after congruent subliminal prime items and (b) a negative priming effect, with longer reaction-times on incongruent visible probe items when the color word corresponded to the color of the rectangle in the preceding subliminal prime item than when it was not. These effects replicate the ones classically reported in studies using visible items and suggest that cognitive control was transferred from the subliminal prime to the visible probe items. Taken together, our results demonstrate that cognitive control can operate on conflicting subliminal information.     

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.     

Partial awareness creates the "illusion" of subliminal semantic priming

We argue that the lack of consensus regarding the existence of subliminal semantic processing arises from not taking into account the fact that linguistic stimuli are represented across several processing levels (features, letters, word form) that can independently reach or not reach awareness. Using masked words, we constructed conditions in which participants were aware of some letters or fragments of a word, while remaining unaware of the whole word. Three experiments using the Stroop priming paradigm show that when the stimulus set is reduced and participants are encouraged to guess the identity of the prime, such partially perceived stimuli can nonetheless give rise to "semantic" processing. We provide evidence that this effect is due to illusory reconstruction of the incompletely perceived stimulus, followed by usual semantic processing of the result. We conclude that previously reported unconscious Stroop priming is in fact a conscious effect, but applied to a perceptual illusion.     

Detecting conscious awareness from involuntary autonomic responses

Can conscious awareness be ascertained from physiological responses alone? We evaluate a novel learning-based procedure permitting detection of conscious awareness without reliance on language comprehension or behavioural responses. The method exploits a situation whereby only consciously detected violations of an expectation alter skin conductance responses (SCRs). Thirty participants listened to sequences of piano notes that, without their being told, predicted a pleasant fanfare or an aversive noise according to an abstract rule. Stimuli were presented without distraction (attended), or while distracted by a visual task to remove awareness of the rule (unattended). A test phase included occasional violations of the rule. Only participants attending the sounds reported awareness of violations and only they showed significantly greater SCR for noise occurring in violation, vs. accordance, with the rule. Our results establish theoretically significant dissociations between conscious and unconscious processing and furnish new opportunities for clinical assessment of residual consciousness in patient populations.     

Nonconscious perception, conscious awareness and attention

Because it is unclear how a nonconscious stimulus is cognitively processed, there is uncertainty concerning variables that modulate the processing. In this context recent findings of a set of neuroimaging experiments are important. These findings suggest that conscious and nonconscious stimuli activate same areas of the brain during performance of a similar task. Further, different areas are activated when a task is performed with or without awareness of processing. It appears that the neural network involved in cognitive processing depends on the awareness of processing rather than awareness of perception. Since conscious and nonconscious cognitive processing use separate neural networks, each processing is modulated by different variables. Attention modulates most conscious cognitive processing and most, but not all, nonconscious processing is attention dependent. Nonconscious tasks that require attentional resources, with or without conscious awareness, are processed using the attention dependent system. Further, because attention dependent and attention independent tasks are processed by separate neural networks, the cognitive processing and modulating variables can be understood better if cognitive tasks are defined as attention dependent or attention independent, rather than conscious or nonconscious.     

Flow and the dynamics of conscious thought

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - The flow construct has been influential within positive psychology, sport psychology, the science of consciousness, the philosophy of agency, and popular...     

Absent-mindedness: Lapses of conscious awareness and everyday cognitive failures

A brief self-report scale was developed to assess everyday performance failures arising directly or primarily from brief failures of sustained attention (attention-related cognitive errors-ARCES). The ARCES was found to be associated with a more direct measure of propensity to attention lapses (Mindful Attention Awareness Scale--MAAS) and to errors on an existing behavioral measure of sustained attention (Sustained Attention to Response Task--SART). Although the ARCES and MAAS were highly correlated, structural modelling revealed the ARCES was more directly related to SART errors and the MAAS to SART RTs, which have been hypothesized to directly reflect the lapses of attention that lead to SART errors. Thus, the MAAS and SART RTs appear to directly reflect attention lapses, whereas the ARCES and SART errors reflect the mistakes these lapses are thought to cause. Boredom proneness was also assessed by the BPS, as a separate consequence of a propensity to attention lapses. Although the ARCES was significantly associated with the BPS, this association was entirely accounted for by the MAAS, suggesting that performance errors and boredom are separate consequences of lapses in attention. A tendency to even extraordinarily brief attention lapses on the order of milliseconds may have far-reaching consequences not only for safe and efficient task performance but also for sustaining the motivation to persist in and enjoy these tasks.     

Anxiety, conscious awareness and change detection

Attentional scanning was studied in anxious and non-anxious participants, using a modified change detection paradigm. Participants detected changes in pairs of emotional scenes separated by two task irrelevant slides, which contained an emotionally valenced scene (the 'distractor scene') and a visual mask. In agreement with attentional control theory, change detection latencies were slower overall for anxious participants. Change detection in anxious, but not non-anxious, participants was influenced by the emotional valence and exposure duration of distractor scenes. When negative distractor scenes were presented at subliminal exposure durations, anxious participants detected changes more rapidly than when supraliminal negative scenes or subliminal positive scenes were presented. We propose that for anxious participants, subliminal presentation of emotionally negative distractor scenes stimulated attention into a dynamic state in the absence of attentional engagement. Presentation of the same scenes at longer exposure times was accompanied by conscious awareness, attentional engagement, and slower change detection.     

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

In their comment on Sandberg, Timmermans, Overgaard, and Cleeremans (2010), Dienes and Seth argue that increased sensitivity of the Perceptual Awareness Scale (PAS) is a consequence of the scale being less exclusive rather than more exhaustive. According to Dienes and Seth, this is because PAS may measure some conscious content, though not necessarily relevant conscious content, “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. Whereas PAS measures the first, confidence judgments and post-decision wagering measure the second.     

Recognition without awareness: An elusive phenomenon

Two recent studies described conditions under which recognition memory performance appeared to be driven by nondeclarative memory. Specifically, participants successfully discriminated old images from highly similar new images even when no conscious memory for the images could be retrieved. Paradoxically, recognition performance was better when images were studied with divided attention than when images were studied with full attention. Furthermore, recognition performance was better when decisions were rated as guesses than when decisions were associated with low or high confidence. In three experiments, we adopted the paradigm used in the earlier studies in an attempt to repeat this intriguing work. Our attempts were unsuccessful. In all experiments, recognition was better when images were studied with full attention than when images were studied with divided attention. Recognition was also better when participants indicated high or low confidence in their decision than when they indicated that their decision was a guess. Thus, our results conformed to what typically has been reported in studies of recognition memory, and we were unable to demonstrate recognition without awareness. We encourage others to explore this paradigm, and to try to identify conditions under which the phenomenon might be demonstrated.Declarative memory refers to the capacity to recollect facts and events, and can be contrasted with a collection of nondeclarative memory abilities, including skills, habits, and the phenomenon of priming, which are expressed through performance rather than recollection (Squire et al. 2004). Declarative memory depends on the integrity of medial temporal lobe structures, while the various forms of nondeclarative memory depend on other brain systems (Schacter and Tulving 1994; Eichenbaum and Cohen 2001; Squire 2004). The best-studied example of declarative memory is recognition memory—the ability to judge items as having been encountered previously. Successful recognition is ordinarily accompanied by a conscious experience of familiarity, and sometimes by conscious memory of the prior encounter itself (Gabrieli 1998).One interesting idea that has been explored in some detail is that recognition memory decisions based on familiarity might also benefit from priming. Priming refers to an improved ability to produce or identify an item on the basis of a recent encounter with the same item or a related item, but without a requirement that there be conscious knowledge of the prior encounter (Tulving and Schacter 1990; Schacter and Buckner 1998). In early studies, it was suggested that previously encountered items might be processed more fluently (e.g., with greater speed and with more ease), and that improved fluency might influence familiarity judgments. Specifically, items perceived with greater fluency might tend to be identified as familiar (Mandler 1980; Jacoby and Dallas 1981; Johnston et al. 1991).This idea encountered difficulty when it was found that severely amnesic patients can perform at chance on conventional recognition tests despite exhibiting intact perceptual priming (Hamann and Squire 1997; Stark and Squire 2000). If fluency facilitates recognition, severely amnesic patients who exhibit intact perceptual priming should perform better than chance on recognition memory tests. Thus, it has seemed that the perceptual fluency that mediates priming does not also support familiarity-based recognition judgments, at least not to a measurable degree. Indeed, the contribution of perceptual fluency appears to be too weak to drive recognition performance noticeably above chance (Conroy et al. 2005).Nonetheless, it remains possible that conditions might be found under which recognition decisions can benefit from perceptual fluency, and in this way be linked to nondeclarative memory. Two recent studies (Voss et al. 2008; Voss and Paller 2009) described conditions under which recognition memory appeared to be significantly driven by nondeclarative memory. Participants studied difficult-to-verbalize images (Fig. 1) with either full attention or divided attention. At test, each image was paired with a highly similar new image, and participants made a speeded forced-choice decision. The striking finding was that, under these conditions, accurate recognition memory performance occurred, but without the awareness that ordinarily accompanies successful recognition. Specifically (and paradoxically), performance was better under divided-attention conditions (which ordinarily degrade memory performance) than under full-attention conditions (Fig. 2A). Furthermore, in one study (Voss et al. 2008), recognition was better when participants reported that they were guessing than when they reported conscious memory of the images (combined high- and low-confidence trials) (Fig. 2B). Notably, this phenomenon occurred only when the test was given in a forced-choice format, and not in a yes/no format. The other study (Voss and Paller 2009) reported a similar advantage for guessing in the divided-attention condition. These two reports appear to demonstrate recognition without awareness and a significant contribution of nondeclarative memory to recognition performance.Open in a separate windowFigure 1.In the full-attention condition, participants studied 14 images for 2 sec each (1.5-sec intertrial interval). Alternatively, in the divided-attention condition, participants studied the images while deciding whether a digit heard during the previous trial was odd or even. The forced-choice recognition test probed memory for the middle 10 images presented in the study sequence. Each studied item was presented together with a highly similar new item, and participants selected the old item by responding “left” or “right.” After each response, participants indicated how confident they were in their recognition decision (G, guess; L, low confidence; H, high confidence).Open in a separate windowFigure 2.Data from Experiment 2 in Voss et al. (2008), estimated from their Figure 2. (A) When recognition was probed using a forced-choice format, performance was more accurate in the divided-attention condition than in the full-attention condition. (B) In both conditions, forced-choice recognition was more accurate in trials where participants indicated that their recognition decision was a guess (G) than in trials where participants indicated low or high confidence (L/H) in their decision. Asterisks indicate performance significantly above chance (P < 0.05). Error bars indicate SEM.These findings challenge the conventional view that recognition memory is more effective when full attention is given to a task than when attention is divided (Anderson 1980), that recognition memory is associated with a conscious experience of familiarity (Gabrieli 1998), and that recognition memory accuracy is positively correlated with ratings of confidence (Reed et al. 1997; Mickes et al. 2007). Because the reported findings are exceptional, we explored the phenomenon further in three separate experiments in an attempt to replicate it and identify its boundary conditions. We adopted the same paradigm as was used in the original study (Voss et al. 2008).