Invisible stimuli, implicit thresholds: Why invisibility judgments cannot be interpreted in isolation

Some studies of unconscious cognition rely on judgments of participants stating that they have "not seen" the critical stimulus (e.g., in a masked-priming experiment). Trials in which participants gave "not-seen" judgments are then treated as those where the critical stimulus was "subliminal" or "unconscious", as opposed to trials with higher visibility ratings. Sometimes, only these trials are further analyzed, for instance, for unconscious priming effects. Here I argue that this practice requires implicit assumptions about subjective measures of awareness incompatible with basic models of categorization under uncertainty (e.g., modern signal-detection and threshold theories). Most importantly, it ignores the potential effects of response bias. Instead of taking "not-seen" judgments literally, they would better be employed in parametric experiments where stimulus visibility is manipulated systematically, not accidentally. This would allow studying qualitative and double dissociations between measures of awareness and of stimulus processing per se.

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