Online research in philosophy

Rosenthal makes assertions about what can and cannot happen without being conscious. Although his distinctions are informative, they do not substitute for data. We have little precise information that differentiates the immediate feeling of awareness, such as that possible for Korsakoff patients, from the later episodic memory of conscious experience. Appeals to introspection are useful starting points, but they are clearly are not to be trusted in this context. Rosenthal also asks why conscious thinking would be more efficacious than thinking that is not conscious. The answer is that the whole armamentarium of planning becomes available to conscious thought, together with episodic memory and the linguistic mediation that goes along with it.

The process-dissociation procedure has been used in a variety of experimental contexts to assess the contributions of conscious and unconscious processes to task performance. To evaluate whether motivation affects estimates of conscious and unconscious processes, participants were given incentives to follow inclusion and exclusion instructions in a perception task and a memory task. Relative to a control condition in which no performance incentives were given, the results for the perception task indicated that incentives increased the participants' ability to exclude previously presented information, which in turn both increased the estimate of conscious processes and decreased the estimate of unconscious processes. However, the results also indicated that incentives did not influence estimates of conscious or unconscious processes in the memory task. The findings suggest that the process-dissociation procedure is relatively immune to influences of motivation when used with a memory task, but that caution should be exercised when the process-dissociation is used with a perception task.

Dienes & Perner's analysis provides a clear theoretical justification for using a demonstration of volitional control as a criterion for conscious awareness. However, in memory tasks, the converse does not hold: A phenomenological awareness of a memory episode can arise involuntarily, even when the task does not require retrieval of the episode. The varying amounts of volitional retrieval required by different memory tasks need to be recognized.