Consciousness of targets during the attentional blink: a gradual or all-or-none dimension?

• Published in: Attention, perception & psychophysics Vol. 73; no. 2; pp. 364 - 373
• Main Authors: Nieuwenhuis, Sander, de Kleijn, Roy
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer-Verlag 01.02.2011; Springer; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Activity levels. Psychomotricity; Attentional Blink; Awareness; Behavioral Science and Psychology; Biological and medical sciences; Cognitive Psychology; Color Perception; Consciousness; Decision Making; Discrimination, Psychological; Experiments; Fashion models; Fixation, Ocular; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Orientation; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Psychology; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Psychomotor Performance; Psychophysics; Rating Scales; Ratings & rankings; Reading; Semantics; Stimuli; Vigilance. Attention. Sleep; Visual Perception; Word Recognition; Attentional blink; Subjective ratings; Consciousness; Awareness; Post-decision wagering; Human; Vision; Perception; Cognition; Experimental study; Visual attention; Subjective evaluation
• ISSN: 1943-3921; 1943-393X; 1943-393X
• DOI: 10.3758/s13414-010-0026-1

Models of consciousness differ in whether they predict a gradual change or a discontinuous transition between nonconscious and conscious perception. Sergent and Dehaene ( Psychological Science, 15 , 720–728, 2004) asked subjects to rate on a continuous scale the subjective visibility of target words presented during an attentional blink. They found that these words were either detected as well as targets outside the attentional-blink period or not detected at all, and interpreted these results as support for a discontinuous transition between nonconscious and conscious processing. We present results from 4 attentional-blink experiments showing that this all-or-none rating pattern disappears with the use of an alternative measure of consciousness (post-decision wagering) and a more difficult identification task. Instead, under these circumstances, subjects used the consciousness rating scales in a continuous fashion. These results are more consistent with models that assume a gradual change between nonconscious and conscious perception during the attentional blink.