1. Perceptual Awareness Occurs Along a Graded Continuum: No Evidence of All-or-None Failures in Continuous Reproduction Tasks.
- Author
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Cohen, Michael A., Keefe, Jonathan, and Brady, Timothy F.
- Subjects
- *
ATTENTIONAL blink , *AWARENESS , *MASKING (Psychology) , *SIGNAL detection - Abstract
Does sensory information reach conscious awareness in a discrete, all-or-nothing manner or a gradual, continuous manner? To answer this question, we examined behavioral performance across four different paradigms that manipulate visual awareness: the attentional blink, backward masking, the Sperling iconic memory paradigm, and retro-cuing. We then asked how well we could account for participants' (N = 112 adults) behavior using a signal detection framework that factors in psychophysical scaling to model participants' responses along a single continuum. We found that this model easily accounted for the data from each of these diverse paradigms. Moreover, we reanalyzed the data from prior studies that had posited a discrete view of perceptual awareness and found that our continuous signal detection model outperformed the models that had been used to support an all-or-nothing view of consciousness. This set of data is consistent with the idea that conscious awareness occurs along a graded continuum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2023
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