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  • Perceptual Awareness Occurs Along a Graded Continuum: No Evidence of All-or-None Failures in Continuous Reproduction Tasks
Title: Perceptual Awareness Occurs Along a Graded Continuum: No Evidence of All-or-None Failures in Continuous Reproduction Tasks
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.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2146988
PAR ID:
10515347
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Sage
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Psychological Science
Volume:
34
Issue:
9
ISSN:
0956-7976
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1033 to 1047
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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