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Consciousness and Cognition

Volume 19, Issue 4, December 2010, Pages 1081-1083
Consciousness and Cognition

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

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2010.05.006Get rights and content

Abstract

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.

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Acknowledgments

B.T. is supported by Marie Curie Action IEF #237502 “Social Brain”. A.C. is a Research Director with the National Fund for Scientific Research (FRS – FNRS, Belgium). M.O. is supported by a Starting Grant, European Research Council. This work is supported by European Commission Grant #043457 “Mindbridge – Measuring Consciousness,” and by Concerted Research Action 06/11-342 “Culturally modified organisms: What it means to be human in the age of culture“, financed by the Ministère de la Communauté

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    For PDW to meet the preconditions would require that subjects be instructed precisely how to wager, in which case it would become very similar to a CR scale. Subjects using PAS seemed to use the lowest scale step when they had no experience, and they seemed to increase their ratings as soon as and only when their experience became clearer (although see Dienes and Seth (2010) for a critique of this, and Timmermans, Sandberg, Cleeremans, and Overgaard (2010) for the reply). However, as subjects were not instructed to use the highest scale step as soon as they could see the stimulus clearly enough to identify it, it is highly probable that PAS did not meet this precondition.

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Reply to Commentaries on Dienes, Z., & Seth, A. (2010). Measuring any conscious content versus measuring the relevant conscious content. Consciousness and Cognition, 19, 1079–1080.

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