Citation

Zehetleitner M, Rausch M. Atten. Percept. Psychophys. 2013; 75(7): 1406-1426.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Leopoldstrasse 13, 80802, Munich, Germany, mzehetleitner@psy.lmu.de.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.3758/s13414-013-0505-2

PMID

23868563

Abstract

Can observers be confident about the accuracy of a discrimination response without a visual experience of the stimulus? In a series of five experiments, observers performed a masked orientation discrimination task, a masked shape discrimination task, or a random-dot motion discrimination task, followed by two subjective ratings after each trial, in which participants reported either their visual experience of the stimulus or their confidence in being correct. We observed that the threshold for ratings of the perception of the stimulus was above the threshold for ratings of a decision, that decision ratings outperformed stimulus ratings in predicting trial accuracy, and that different decision-related scales were more strongly associated with other decision-related scales than with ratings of stimulus clarity. We propose a taxonomy of subjective measures of consciousness that differentiates between subjective measures relating to the percept of the stimulus and measures relating to a discrimination decision and discuss the relation to type II blindsight.

Language: en