Snodgrass & Shevrin 2006 Unconscious Inhibition and Facilitation at The Objective Detection Threshold - Replicable and Qualitatively Different Unconscious Perceptual Effects

Cognition 101 (2006) 4379 www.elsevier.
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Unconscious inhibition and facilitation at the objective detection threshold: Replicable and qualitatively different unconscious perceptual effects
Michael Snodgrass*, Howard Shevrin
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48105, USA Received 27 July 2004; accepted 27 June 2005
Abstract Although the veridicality of unconscious perception is increasingly accepted, core issues remain unresolved [Jack, A., & Shallice, T. (2001). Introspective physicalism as an approach to the science of consciousness. Cognition, 79, 161196], and sharp disagreement persists regarding fundamental methodological and theoretical issues. The most critical problem is simple but tenaciousnamely, how to denitively rule out weak conscious perception as an alternative explanation for putatively unconscious effects. Using a direct task and objectively undetectable stimuli, the current experiments demonstrate clearly reliable unconscious perceptual effects, which differ qualitatively from weakly conscious effects in fundamental ways. Most importantly, the current effects correlate negatively with stimulus detectability, directly rebutting the exhaustiveness, null sensitivity, and exclusiveness problems [Reingold, E., & Merikle, P. (1988). Using direct and indirect measures to study perception without awareness. Perception & Psychophysics, 44, 563575; Reingold, E., & Merikle, P. (1990). On the inter-relatedness of theory and measurement in the study of unconscious processes. Mind and Language, 5, 928)], which all predict positive correlations. Moreover, the current effects are entirely bidirectional [Katz, (2001). Bidirectional experimental effects. Psychological Methods, 6, 270281)] and radically uncontrollable, including below-chance performance despite intentions to facilitate. In contrast, weakly conscious effects on direct measures are unidirectional, facilitative, and potentially controllable. Moreover, these qualitative differences also suggest that objective and subjective threshold phenomena are fundamentally distinct, rather than the former simply being a
* Corresponding author. Address: Department of Psychiatry, University of Michigan, 2101 Commonwealth, Suite B, Ann Arbor, MI 48105, USA. Tel.: C1 734 936 8703; fax: C1 734 764 3506. E-mail address: jmsnodgr@umich.edu (M. Snodgrass).
0022-2860/$ - see front matter q 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2005.06.006
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M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379
weaker version of the latter [Merikle, P., Smilek, D., & Eastwood, J. (2001). Perception without awareness: Perspectives from cognitive psychology. Cognition, 79, 115134]. Accordingly, it is important to distinguish between rather than conate these methods. Further, the current effects reinforce recent work [e.g. Naccache, L., Blandin, E., & Dehaene, S. (2002). Unconscious masked priming depends on temporal attention. Psychological Science, 13, 416424] demonstrating that unconscious effects, although not selectively controllable, are nonetheless mediated by strategic and individual difference factors, rather than being immune to such inuences as long thought. q 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
The history of unconscious perception has been characterized by a boom and bust cycle of critical acceptability (Greenwald, 1992; Jack & Shallice, 2001). Currently, unconscious perception enjoys broad acceptance (see e.g., the March, 2001 special issue on consciousness in Cognition). This latest swing of the pendulum is perhaps related to the growing acceptance of the study of consciousness in general, and in particular to a greater willingness to regard participants subjective phenomenology as a legitimate subject of scientic inquiry. Although we applaud these developments and ourselves argue for the reality of unconscious perception (Shevrin, 1968; Snodgrass, Shevrin, & Kopka, 1993a,b), we agree with Jack and Shallice (2001, p. 163) that the fundamental methodological problems in this area remain unresolved. Consequently, the emerging positive consensus lacks a rm foundation, and may simply perpetuate the boom and bust cycle unless these difculties are satisfactorily addressed. The most critical problem is deceptively simple and surprisingly tenaciousnamely, denitively ruling out weak conscious perception as an alternative explanation for putatively unconscious effects. If such alternative explanations remain viable, models that postulate only a single, conscious perceptual process are more parsimonious and hence to be preferred. Indeed, using this reasoning, several critiques have recently appeared (Dulany, 1997; Perruchet & Vinter, 2002) which deny that unconscious perception exists at all. In this paper, we present evidence for exceptionally reliable unconscious perceptual effects obtained under stimulus exposure conditions widely held to be maximally stringentnamely, wherein participants cannot detect even the mere presence versus absence of the relevant stimuli. Notably, the current effects reect unconscious perceptual inuences on a direct task, as opposed to the usual strategy of seeking unconscious effects on indirect tasks. Further, it will emerge that these effects reect qualitative differences which: (1) provide particularly strong evidence against alternative weak conscious perception accounts; (2) suggest that the two primary methods for assessing consciousness (i.e. objective versus subjective threshold approaches; see below) may index fundamentally distinct phenomena; and (3) underscore the importance of strategic factors in mediating even completely unconscious effects, long thought immune to such inuences. Before proceeding to the current paradigm and ndings, we rst briey discuss the relevant methodological and theoretical issues in order to clarify the basis for these implications.
1. Methodological and theoretical issues in demonstrating unconscious perception Attempts to demonstrate unconscious perceptual inuences typically rely on some version of the dissociation paradigm (Erdelyi, 1985, 1986). Usually, performance on two
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tasks is compared; one intended to index conscious perception, the other unconscious perception. In its classic and most common form, the dissociation paradigm seeks to obtain effects on the unconscious perception index despite null sensitivity on the conscious perception index, thus justifying inferences for unconscious perception. The latter is typically a basic, direct perceptual discrimination task (e.g. detection), whereas the former is often an indirect task requiring more complex processing (e.g. semantic priming). Direct tasks inform participants of the stimulus manipulation and ask them to perform intentional judgments concerning the relevant aspects of the ostensibly subliminal stimuli. For example, presence/absence detection tasks straightforwardly ask participants to discern whether or not a stimulus was just presented. In contrast, indirect tasks do not inform participants of the relevant stimulus manipulation, but instead assess noninstructed effects of the ostensibly subliminal stimuli, usually on subsequent processing of other stimuli, as in semantic priming effects.1 Further, although typical, direct versus indirect comparisons are not essential. Rather, the fundamental requirement of the dissociation paradigm is that the conscious perception index be exhaustively sensitive (Reingold & Merikle, 1990) to all conscious perception that could contribute to (putatively) unconscious perception index effects. If so, either direct or indirect tasks can be used to index unconscious perception (cf. Merikle & Reingold, 1990). If not, unconscious perception cannot be validly inferred no matter how it is indexed.
2. But how should awareness be assessed? Everyone agrees that conscious perception is positively related to stimulus intensity. Strong stimuli are clearly visible; as stimulus intensity is reduced (by varying stimulus duration and/or the intensity of masking), visual percepts become fainter and less distinct. Finally, when stimuli are sufciently weak, conscious perception seems eliminated. But how, exactly, should one dene the threshold for consciousness? It turns out that there are two basic alternatives. 2.1. Subjective threshold approaches The most obvious and intuitively appealing way to index phenomenal awareness is to manipulate stimulus intensity and simply ask participants to indicate when they can no longer see (or hear, etc.) the relevant stimuli. This stimulus intensity is then taken to indicate the threshold for consciousness. Because such methods focus on participants self-reports of their phenomenal states rather than their behavioral performance, they are called subjective threshold approaches (Cheesman & Merikle, 1984, 1986). Notably, under such conditions, participants not only exhibit robust indirect effects but moreover
1 The other, less commonly employed species of indirect task involves asking participants to make judgments about irrelevant (i.e. nonmanipulated) aspects of the ostensibly subliminal stimuli. For example, subliminal mere exposure paradigms (e.g. Kunst-Wilson & Zajonc, 1980) participants make judgments about pairs of stimuli, one previously presented, one new. Under direct instructions, participants attempt to discern which stimulus was previously presented; under indirect instructions, they are asked which of the two stimuli they prefer.
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perform substantially above chance on direct discrimination tasks (e.g. forced-choice identication) as well. Indeed, such above-chance performance on direct tasks is the canonical subjective threshold effect, and is how such effects were initially discovered (cf. Adams, 1957). With the development of signal detection theory (SDT; e.g. Green & Swets, 1966), however, it became clear that that subjective thresholds might simply reect response criterions applied to a single, continuously varying conscious process, rather than indexing a dichotomous conscious/unconscious boundary. From this perspective, subjective threshold effects can be plausibly interpreted in terms of weak conscious perception (see, e.g. Green & Swets, 1966, pp. 335337; Holender, 1986; Macmillan, 1986; Macmillan & Creelman, 1991, pp. 112, 239, 255; Merikle, 1982), because denials of awareness may reect very low condence rather than a complete absence of awareness. Importantly, the SDT criterion artifact critique does not question or reject participants self-reports, but views them as resulting from both perceptual and decision processes rather than being unmediated readouts, as it were, of participants phenomenal states. Indeed, a core nding of SDT is that perceptual sensitivity (d 0 ) and the response criterion (c) are independent, separable processes, and hence that for any given level of sensitivity participants can voluntarily shift their response criterion depending on the exigencies of the experimental situation. Accordingly, participants can and do respond differently to the same stimuli depending upon where they place their criterion. With all this in mind, subjective threshold approaches face serious problems in ruling out alternative weak conscious perception explanations. At the same time, the SDT critique does not demand this skeptical conclusion; it remains possible that such stimuli really are phenomenally unconscious. 2.2. Objective threshold approaches To minimize the plausibility of alternative weak conscious perception accounts, some investigators prefer to arrange stimulus conditions such that participants not only deny awareness but perform at chance (i.e. d 0 Z0), not above, on direct discrimination tasks (e.g. Draine & Greenwald, 1998; Naccache & Dehaene, 2001). This stimulus intensity is then taken as the threshold for consciousness. Such methods are called objective threshold approaches (Cheesman & Merikle, 1984) because they rely on direct task performance rather than self-report.2 Not surprisingly, objective threshold conditions are more stringent than subjective threshold conditionsthat is, the former require even weaker stimulus intensities than the latter. However, although these paradigms are clearly less vulnerable to SDT-based criterion artifact concerns, they nonetheless still suffer from the null sensitivity problem (Macmillan, 1986; Reingold & Merikle, 1990). Namely, even if null sensitivity is apparently obtained, intrinsic measurement error means that participants true, underlying sensitivity might actually exceed zero.
Of course, indirect tasks (e.g. priming effects) can be objective as well; in this context, the objective versus subjective distinction is understood to refer to subtypes of direct tasks.
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Some progress on the null sensitivity problem has recently been made by Greenwald and associates (e.g. Greenwald, Klinger, & Schuh, 1995) regression approach. This method regresses indirect performance onto direct performance, and the y-intercept is taken as the point estimate of the indirect effect when direct d 0 Z0. However, because direct performance still contains measurement error, it is not clear that this really solves the null sensitivity problem. In particular, when the slope and the means of the direct and indirect measures are positive, which is often the case, y-intercepts are overestimated. Although Klauer, Greenwald, and Draine (1998) have proposed corrective procedures, they may not be sufcient (see Dosher, 1998; Miller, 2000; but see also Klauer & Greenwald, 2000). Further, the validity of the regression method depends on whether using the regression equation for predictive purposes (i.e. to estimate y-intercepts) is justied at all. Doing so is clearly valid when the direct and indirect measures are related (although measurement error is still problematic), but not when they are unrelated. Given that these measures are typically unrelated in regression method experiments (e.g. Draine & Greenwald, 1998), the associated y-intercepts may be invalid (cf. Dosher, 1998; Merikle & Reingold, 1998; Snodgrass, Bernat, & Shevrin, 2004a), leaving the null sensitivity problem essentially intact. 2.3. So how can alternative weak conscious perception accounts be denitively ruled out? To deal with this nagging concern, many investigators attempt to obtain converging evidence by demonstrating qualitative differences between conscious and putatively unconscious effects. Although intuitively appealing, however, qualitative differences are difcult to interpret because they may simply indicate an additional conscious process (cf. Dulany, 1997; Erdelyi, 1986; Holender, 1986). We return to this problem later; for now, we discuss further implications of subjective versus objective threshold approaches.
3. The theoretical tension between subjective and objective threshold approaches The very idea of objective threshold effects raises important theoretical and methodological questions. Namely, if subjective threshold approaches are valid, the robustly above-chance performance on direct tasks obtained under such conditions is due to unconscious inuences. If so, reducing stimulus intensity to the point that direct task performance is at chance, as objective threshold methods require, should seriously reduce or even eliminate not only conscious but unconscious perceptual inuences as well. In short, objective threshold effects should be intrinsically weak or absent, especially on direct tasks. Accordingly, it would seem that objective threshold approaches must make the strong assumption that direct measures are sensitive only to conscious perceptual inuences (cf. Reingold & Merikle, 1990viz. the exclusiveness problem). Conversely, if reliable objective threshold effects are indeed obtainable, this would seem to indicate that direct tasks actually are insensitive to unconscious inuences. If this is true, then subjective threshold effects on direct tasks must be due to conscious rather than unconscious inuences, which imply that subjective threshold methods are invalid. In a nutshell, subjective and objective threshold methods appear to make conicting
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assumptions about unconscious inuences on direct tasks, which in turn suggests that the two approaches cannot both be valid. To resolve this dilemma, Merikle and Daneman, 2000) and Merikle, Smilek, and Eastwood 2001) have recently suggested that both subjective and objective threshold approaches have produced reliable results, and that the latter are simply more conservative versions of the former. This amounts to the claim that putatively objective threshold effects are, in reality, weak subjective threshold effectsthat is, not really objective threshold effects at all. In other words, Merikle and associates explain objective threshold effects by invoking the null sensitivity problem, arguing that true direct task performance in objective threshold paradigms actually does exceed chance, despite obtained null sensitivity. They further imply that subjective and objective threshold paradigms produce similar (i.e. not qualitatively different) effects, although they provide no specic support for this claim. If Merikle and associates are correct, there would be good reasons to simply abandon objective threshold approaches (cf. Merikle & Reingold, 1998). For example, whereas subjective threshold effects are easily obtainable, some argue that reliable, genuine objective threshold effects are difcult (e.g. Greenwald, 1992; Holender, 1986) or even impossible (Merikle & Reingold, 1998) to obtain, or are intrinsically very short-lived and thus obtainable only under highly speeded conditions (Draine & Greenwald, 1998). If objective threshold approaches indeed suffer from these limitations, it would support the contention that they are unnecessarily conservative, making it more difcult to study unconscious perception. Further, one could argue that objective threshold approaches are inherently wrongheaded in that they emphasize behavioral performance, whereas subjective threshold approaches appear to deal straightforwardly with phenomenal experience itself (Jack & Shallice, 2001; Merikle & Daneman, 2000; Merikle et al., 2001). With all these considerations in mind, one might conclude that objective threshold approaches are at best superuous and at worst obscure the very phenomenon they seek to elucidate. In this paper, we present evidence for reliable unconscious perceptual inuences on direct task performance under objective threshold conditions, extending the paradigm rst used by Snodgrass et al. (1993a) and replicated by Van Selst and Merikle (1993). We present both new experiments and meta-analyses of the original and new experiments. Contrary to the position outlined in the preceding paragraph, the current ndings will suggest that objective threshold effects are reliably obtainable, are not very short-lived, and are not merely weak, overly conservative subjective threshold effects in disguisein short, that objective and subjective threshold approaches may index qualitatively distinct phenomena. Before proceeding, however, it is useful to further examine the issues concerning unconscious perceptual inuences on direct tasks.
4. Direct measures, unconscious perceptual inuences, and the current paradigm In the current paradigm, SDT detection is the conscious perception index, and forcedchoice identicationalso a direct taskis the unconscious perception index. Although using direct tasks to index unconscious inuences is common (indeed, canonical) in
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subjective threshold approaches, objective threshold approaches typically use indirect tasks for this purpose. Indeed, it may seem particularly paradoxical to seek unconscious inuences on identication given that it is often used to index conscious perception (e.g. Cheesman & Merikle, 1984). Recalling, however, that direct tasks may be sensitive to both conscious and unconscious perceptual inuences, identication can be used to index either kind of inuence, depending on the research interest and design. For example, if demonstrating unconscious inuences on semantic priming tasks (cf. Cheesman & Merikle, 1984) is of interest, identication is a perfectly good conscious perception index because any semantic effect driven by consciously perceived information requires at least partial stimulus identication (i.e. identication is exhaustively sensitive in this context). Accordingly, one could infer unconscious semantic priming effects if they occurred despite null identication sensitivity. Analogously, where, as in the current paradigm, demonstrating unconscious inuences on identication is of interest, such inuences can be inferred if nonzero identication occurs despite null detection sensitivity, provided that SDT detection is exhaustively sensitive to all conscious perceptual inuences on identication. There are strong reasons, discussed below, to believe that detection is relevantly exhaustively sensitive in this context; for now, we simply note that detection is widely agreed to be the most sensitive conscious perception index of all. 4.1. Intentional versus nonintentional inuences But how, exactly, could unconscious perceptual inuences manifest on direct measures, and how could they be distinguished from conscious perceptual inuences? After all, it seems most parsimonious to simply attribute any obtained direct effects to the latter, especially given that direct instructions straightforwardly request that participants utilize their conscious perceptions to perform the task. Further, as we have seen, it seems very difcult to denitively rule out alternative weak conscious perception accounts, even with objective threshold approaches (cf. null sensitivity concerns). If direct task performance is indeed based on conscious perception, however, one might further expect that participants should be able to selectively control their responses to the relevant stimuli, and further that performance should be maximal when effortful attempts to utilize available conscious perception are made. With this in mind, unconscious perception advocates have generally responded by attempting to distinguish between qualitatively distinct intentional and nonintentional inuences on direct task performance. That is, although direct performance is clearly intentional in the broadest sense (i.e. participants attempt to comply with the experimental instructions), it might be that the relevant direct effects are not due to intentionally guided choices based on weak but conscious perceptions, but rather result from intrinsically uncontrollable, priming-like inuences on direct response selection. Along these lines, Merikle and associates have presented evidence (e.g. Cheesman & Merikle, 1986; Merikle & Joordens, 1997a,b; Merikle, Joordens, & Stolz, 1995) suggesting that responses to subjective threshold stimuli cannot be consciously controlled, and infer accordingly that such stimuli are indeed unconsciously perceived.
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Similarly, on the objective threshold side, Marcel (1983a, Experiments 1 and 2) found that unconscious inuences on direct tasks occurred only when participants adopted a passive approach, and moreover that such effects could not be consciously controlled (see also Dixon, 1981, pp. 9394). With this in mind, in the current paradigm we sought to examine the inuence of task strategy on direct task performance. All participants used two strategies: In the look (intentional) strategy, participants attempted to base their identication responses on whatever they could see, whereas in the pop (nonintentional) strategy participants responded with the rst word that popped into their heads. In this way, although direct instructions were used throughout, any mediating inuences of intentional versus nonintentional task strategies could still be examined. Finally, we also examined strategy preference, an individual difference measure. Reasoning that participants attitudes toward the strategies might be important, we asked them which of the two they preferred or liked better.
5. The original experiments In the original experiments (Snodgrass et al., 1993a, Experiments 1 and 2; replicated by Van Selst & Merikle, 1993, Experiments 1 and 2), Preference!Strategy interactions were repeatedly obtained; there were no main effects. The pooled data are presented in Table 1. Simple effects analyses indicated that the interaction was primarily carried by a Preference congruity effect in the pop strategy: look preference participants (lookers) repeatedly performed below chance (the inhibition effect), whereas weaker evidence suggested that pop preference participants (poppers) performed above chance. It is useful to briey discuss key aspects of the original experiments ndings to set the stage for the current experiments. On the one hand, the weak look strategy ndings suggest that direct tasks may indeed be exclusively sensitive to conscious perceptual inuences when intentional response strategies are used. In contrast, unconscious perceptual inuences readily emerged under nonintentional pop instructions. Notably, however, the form of the pop strategy ndings was highly unusual. Rather than producing greater overall facilitation, pop instructions produced both facilitation and (especially) inhibition, mediated by Preference. Moreover, overall performance collapsed across both Preference and Strategy was at chance (XZ24.96; chanceZ25%). This is quite striking; normally, putatively unconscious perceptual effects, whether direct or indirect, exhibit overall
Table 1 Performance by Preference and Strategy from Snodgrass et al. (1993a; Experiments 1 and 2); Van Selst and Merikle (1993; Experiments 1 and 2)pooled data Strategy Preference Pop (nZ48) Look (nZ40) Pop 26.55 (4.11) 23.31a (3.50)
a
Look 24.27 (4.34) 25.52 (3.51)
Standard deviations and ns are in parentheses. Mean performance is percentage correct collapsed across individual word (chanceZ25). a The 95% condence intervals of these means do not include 25 (chance).
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deviations from chancein particular, facilitation. With this in mind, the looker inhibition effect is especially notable; it seems doubly nonintentional, manifesting both only under pop instructions and counter to participants intentions to facilitate (i.e. uncontrollable), perhaps providing particularly strong evidence against alternative weak conscious perception accounts. 5.1. Unidirectional versus bidirectional effects As Katz (2001) explained, psychological research has concerned itself almost exclusively with unidirectional effectsthat is, effects where a manipulation produces changes on overall means, whether in a facilitatory or inhibitory direction. However, it is also possible for a manipulation to affect the variance rather than the meanthat is, produce bidirectional effects. Such effects imply the presence of underlying interactions producing offsetting facilitation and inhibition, and will be missed unless the variance or mediating factors are examined. Finally, a manipulation might produce both unidirectional and bidirectional effects; the two kinds of effects are statistically independent. Here, for example, overall identication could have exceeded chance and Preference!Strategy interactions could have been obtained. Notably, however, the original ndings are exclusively bidirectional, with no hint of a unidirectional component. This contrasts sharply with the powerful undirectional inuences readily evident on direct tasks under subjective threshold conditions, and could moreover explain why objective threshold effects have been difcult to replicate on direct tasks (cf. Holender, 1986). Such nonreplications (e.g. Nolan & Caramazza, 1982) examined only undirectional effects; moreover, unlike Marcel (1983a), they did not ensure that nonintentional task strategies were used. 5.2. Evidence for objective detection threshold status In the original investigations, detectability was assessed in separate experiments. Van Selst and Merikle (1993, Experiment 3) replicated our procedures exactly, replacing identication with SDT detection. They concluded (p. 201) that null detection sensitivity (overall XZ49.3%) was achieved; further, Preference and Strategy had no effect. Their ndings are particularly compelling given the large number (240) of trials, and replicated our own null detection results (Snodgrass et al., 1993a, Experiment 3). Moreover, by conducting the detection and identication tasks under identical conditions, they showed that the experimental effects were not due to some general increase in visibility caused by pop instructions.
6. The current experimentsrationale and overview of organization and presentation Although the original experiments were promising, we thought further replication of these effects advisable for two reasons: (1) objective threshold effects remain controversial (cf. Merikle & Reingold, 1998; Perruchet & Vinter, 2002), perhaps especially using direct
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tasks (cf. Holender, 1986); and (2) their exclusively bidirectional nature is highly unusual, perhaps reecting important qualitative differences including a particularly powerful demonstration of uncontrollability, a widely popular criterion for distinguishing unconscious versus conscious inuences. Because the current (as well as the original) investigations used very similar procedures, we begin with a General Method section. We then present Experiments 1a and 1b. Although these experiments replicated the primary identication task ndings, they suggested important additional modications as well. To evaluate the reliability of these new (as well as the primary) ndings, we then present a meta-analysis of these six early experiments (i.e., Snodgrass et al., 1993a, Experiments 1 and 2; Van Selst & Merikle, 1993, Experiments 1 and 2; the current Experiments 1a and 1b). To anticipate, it will emerge that both the primary and additional ndings are reliable. However, even if their reliability is assumed, problematic methodological issues remain. We then derive a novel prediction, which addresses these issues empirically. This key prediction is tested in Experiment 2, and further evidence suggesting that the current effects are unconscious is obtained. Following a nal meta-analysis (adding Experiment 2), we suggest an interpretation for their bidirectional form. Finally, we address broader implications in the General discussion.
7. General method 7.1. Participants University students were paid $1015, depending on the particular study. All participants had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and were native English speakers. 7.2. Apparatus and materials Words were presented for 1 ms in a Gerbrand Model T3-8 Tachistoscope. Luminance was 10 fL for the stimulus eld, xation eld, and ambient room light. Participants initially xated a black dot on an otherwise blank stimulus card. The stimulus eld (containing the word) was then ashed for 1 ms, followed immediately by the xation eld once more. Luminance levels were constant throughout; there were no dark elds, thus obviating any lighting adaptation confounds (cf. Holender, 1986). Further, pattern masking was not used. Instead, the stimuli were unmasked; with such procedures, extremely brief stimulus durations are necessary to prevent stimulus detection. The four stimulus words were balanced for frequency (Kucera & Francis, 1967) and reected pleasant and unpleasant emotional connotations. Pleasure and Rose were the pleasant words; Fighting and Pain the unpleasant ones (from evaluative norms Osgood, May, & Miron, 1975). The four words also reected a structural dimension (two long, two short). The words were printed on white 4!6 cards in Helvetica Light 18 pt. press type. The viewing distance was 75 cm; the visual angle ranged from 1 to 2.58, well within foveal resolution.
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7.3. Procedure Participants were tested in 112 h sessions, and were informed that we were studying how well they could identify briey presented words. We informed them of the words identities and that each word would be presented an equal number of times in random order. They were told that the task was difcult, but to respond even if they saw nothing. It was sometimes necessary to reassure participants that stimuli were actually being presented, because they usually felt that nothing at all was occurringno ash, no mask, no apparent change in the visual display at all. Following an experimenter-provided cue, participants focused on the xation point, the stimulus was ashed, and they provided their 4AFC identication response. Participants were also told that we wanted to examine the effects of two task strategies. Look instructions asked them to look very hard where the word is presented, around the black dot, for anything you can see. Conversely, pop instructions asked participants to relax and just look where the word is presented and say whatever word pops into your head (constrained by the forced-choice task). After a 24-trial practice block, participants completed ve blocks of 24 trials each per strategy; the two strategy conditions were blocked and counterbalanced. Each word appeared six times per block in randomized order, but no word appeared more than twice consecutively. There were thus 120 trials per strategy condition (30 per word), 240 in all. The experimenter was blind to the stimulus cards identities. Computer-generated performance feedback was given after each block. Following all experimental trials, we asked participants which of the two strategies they preferred or liked better, thus yielding the strategy preference variable. Finally, our dependent variable was percentage correct identication averaged across the four stimuli.
8. Experiments 1a and 1b In Experiment 1a, we additionally collected event-related potential (ERP) brain wave measurements from participants while engaged in our paradigm; these ERP results are presented elsewhere (Shevrin, Snodgrass, Kushwaha, & Bernat, 2002). In Experiment 1b, we included female participants; our previous experiments used only males. For both experiments, we predicted that lookers would inhibit under pop instructions, and secondarily that poppers might facilitate under pop instructionsthat is, Preference! Strategy interactions similar to the original experiments. All P-values are two-tailed unless otherwise noted. Given the original experiments evidence that our exposure conditions met the objective detection threshold, the current Experiments 1a and 1b did not include detection tasks. 8.1. Participants, apparatus and materials, and procedure Experiment 1as had 17 male participants; 1b had 40 female participants. Experiment 1a procedure differed slightly in that participants were urged to keep still to avoid contaminating the ERP measurements with muscle artifacts. Experiment 1bs procedures were unchanged.
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8.2. Results The means for Experiments 1a and 1b are presented in Table 2. Most importantly, the inhibition effect replicatedlookers performed below chance (25%) under pop instructions [Experiment 1a: t(8)Z2.16, P!.04 (one-tail); 1b: t(17)Z2.06, P!.03 (one-tail). Unlike the original experiments, however, poppers did not facilitate under pop instructions in either Experiment 1a [both Fs!1]. Moreover, lookers unexpectedly facilitated under look instructions [Experiment 1a: t(8)Z2.13, P!.07; 1b: t(17)Z3.77, P!.001]. Thus, the Preference!Strategy interaction [Experiment 1a: F(1,15)Z1.34, ns; 1b: F(1,38)Z14.04, P!.001] now seemed mainly due not only to looker inhibition under pop instructions, but looker facilitation under look instructions as wellthat is, a looker simple effect. Finally, some evidence for a Strategy main effect emerged [Experiment 1a: F(1,15)Z7.90, P!.02; 1b: F(1,38)Z2.94, P!.10], suggesting a general tendency for pop inhibition and look facilitation. This main effect seems secondary, however, being carried essentially entirely by the looker simple effect. 8.2.1. Preliminary meta-analyses Although the key looker inhibition effects replicated prior results, other ndings seemed to differ in certain respects. To clarify these ambiguities, a meta-analysis was conducted with the available datathe four original experiments (Snodgrass et al., 1993a, Experiments 1 and 2; Van Selst & Merikle, 1993, Experiments 1 and 2) and the current Experiments 1a and 1b. Thanks to Van Selst and Merikle making their raw data available, we combined the data for all six experiments directly, which Hedges and Olkin (1985, p. 9) noted is ...the best possible case [for meta-analytic cumulation]. Further, experiment was initially included in the model to test for heterogeneity; it was dropped because it was nonsignicant throughout. This nding is important because it means that the apparent differences between the original and current experiments (e.g. the apparent absence versus presence of the looker facilitation effect) were likely not genuine, but rather due to sampling error. Finally, meta-analytic P-values are two-tailed unless otherwise stated.
Table 2 Performance by Preference and Strategy from Experiments 1a and 1b Experiment 1a Strategy Preference Pop Look Pop 24.79 (4.49) (nZ8) 22.53a (3.34) (nZ9) Look 26.67 (4.56) 26.94 (2.73) Pop 25.00 (4.45) (nZ22) 22.78a (4.58) (nZ18) Experiment 1b Strategy Look 22.92 (5.29) 28.38b (3.79)
Standard deviations and ns are in parentheses. Mean performance is percentage correct collapsed across individual word (chanceZ25). a These means are below chance (P!.05) by a priori contrasts. b The 95% condence interval of this mean does not include 25 (chance).
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The key looker inhibition effect under pop instructions was reliable, F(1,66)Z17.66, PZ8.12!10K5. Interestingly, looker facilitation under look instructions was also reliable, F(1,66)Z10.92, PZ002. The Preference!Strategy interaction was highly reliable, F(1,143)Z29.27, PZ2.58!10K7, and was carried primarily by the looker simple effect, as noted above. On the other hand, popper facilitation under pop instructions was marginal, F(1,77)Z3.70, PZ.06, as was the Strategy main effect, F(1,143)Z2.81, PZ.09.
9. Discussion Experiments 1a and 1b and the preliminary meta-analysis indicated that the Preference!Strategy interaction, including the looker inhibition effect, was quite reliable. With the benet of this additional data, however, the form of this interaction was claried importantly. Whereas it originally appeared that this interaction was carried by a pop strategy simple effect, inclusion of Experiments 1a and 1b suggest that it is best characterized as a looker simple effect, with little indication of popper effects in either strategy. At the same time, other key features of the obtained effects remained constant specically, they are exclusively bidirectional (the overall XZ24.84 did not differ from chance) and congruent with Preference. However, the emergence of looker facilitation under look instructions raises important questions. On the one hand, if this facilitation is produced by unconscious perception, it suggests that even maximally direct measures (i.e. both direct and intentional) are indeed sensitive to unconscious perceptual inuences, contrary to what the original experiments suggested. On the other hand, one might skeptically wonder whether this facilitation was simply caused by weak conscious perception, despite the previously established null detection sensitivity. If so, one might also wonder whether the key looker inhibition effect was somehow conscious after all.
10. Methodological problems in unconscious perception research Questions such as these return our attention to unresolved methodological issues in unconscious perception researchmost importantly, ruling out alternative weak conscious perception explanations. There are two components to this difcultythe exhaustiveness and null sensitivity problems (Reingold & Merikle, 1988, 1990). The exhaustiveness problem proper concerns whether the conscious perception index taps the relevant kind of conscious perceptionthat is, any and all conscious perception that could explain putatively unconscious perception index effects. On the other hand, the null sensitivity problem is a matter of degreethat is, one could have the right conscious perception index, but still be unable to demonstrate that the relevant conscious perception has been completely eliminated due to intrinsic measurement error. Conversely, even if it were possible to convincingly demonstrate null sensitivity, this alone would not sufce unless it were further demonstrated that the conscious perception index is relevantly exhaustive. Finally, the exclusiveness problem apparently implies that objective and
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subjective threshold paradigms cannot both be valid (see Theoretical Tension section above). With the Reingold and Merikle critique in mind, then, one could question SDT detections exhaustiveness, despite its intuitive plausibility, simply because detection and identication are different measures. Indeed, this was Van Selst and Merikles (1993) main criticism of our paradigm, and is consistent with Reingold and Merikles (1990) view that any difference at all between the conscious and unconscious perception indexes is sufcient to raise insuperable exhaustiveness concerns. Further, null sensitivity concerns suggest that true detection sensitivity could conceivably have actually exceeded chance. These two concerns amount to the familiar worry that putatively unconscious effects may actually be weakly conscious. Finally, following the exclusiveness problem logic, one could assert that our ndings are prima facie impossible, or at least seriously underestimate the true effects. Accordingly, we now briey present our methodological analysis (for a full discussion, see Snodgrass, in press; Snodgrass et al., 2004a), culminating in a design change for Experiment 2, which allows a direct test of these skeptical concerns.
11. Inferring unconscious perception by falsifying the conscious-perception-only model The core of the dissociation paradigm logic is that higher-level effects (e.g. semantic processing) should not be possible in the absence of lower-level effects (e.g. stimulus detection) if only conscious perception is involved. This is so because higher-level effects require more stimulus information (and stronger stimuli; see below) than lower-level effects; indeed, the former are built upon and presume the latter. For example, semantic analysis cannot occur unless the stimuli are at least partially identied; in turn, stimulus identication cannot occur without some degree of stimulus detection. In short, the dissociation paradigm logic assumes that conscious perception functions on a hierarchical strength/complexity continuum, such that greater stimulus intensity is required in order for more complex effects to occur. Marcel (1983b) called this the Identity Assumption, which holds that conscious percepts reect the highest level of analysis (as well as the constitutive lower levels) achieved by the stimuli. Accordingly, the two core predictions of the conscious-perception-only model are: (1) lower-level and higher-level effects should correlate positively, and (2) higher-level effects should disappear when lower-level effects approach zero. Thus, when higher-level effects are obtained despite chance performance on relevant lower-level measures, the Identity Assumption is violated, and inferences for an additional, unconscious perceptual process are supported. Conversely, the reverse pattern (e.g. above-chance detection but no semantic effects) can be explained positing only a single, conscious perceptual process. This is why Marcels (1983a) results were controversialabsent the Identity Assumption, no one would have been surprised in the rst place. These considerations further clarify why unconscious perception indexes can be either indirect or direct; what is crucial is that they tap higher levels of processing than the conscious perception index. Indeed, subjective threshold approaches employ analogous
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reasoning; they assume that participants denial of awareness is a basic, less complex judgment which should rule out conscious perceptual explanations for more complex, higher-order effects. Accordingly, using different measures to index conscious and unconscious perception can be a virtue, not a liability, provided that the proper hierarchical strength/complexity relationships are observed.3 11.1. So which measures are exhaustive? The above logic has implicitly guided the choice of conscious perception indexes in almost all dissociation paradigm experiments, and implies an exhaustiveness hierarchy such that identication is exhaustively sensitive to semantically-relevant conscious perception, and that detection is exhaustively sensitive to identication-relevant conscious perception. Available empirical evidence supports the proposed hierarchy; it turns out that objective identication thresholds are below (i.e. require more stringent exposure conditions than) objective semantic classication thresholds, and in turn that objective detection thresholds are below objective identication thresholds (see Snodgrass et al., 2004a for a review). Further, these hierarchical relationships are inherent in basic cognitive theoryfor example, in standard word recognition models (cf. McClelland, 1987; McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981). 11.2. Specic evidence for SDT detections exhaustiveness SDT models also support the proposed exhaustiveness hierarchy. For example, and most importantly for the current paradigm, SDT holds that forced-choice identication simply is multidimensional detection (Green & Birdsall, 1978; Macmillan & Creelman, 1991), rather than being some unrelated, incommensurate task as Reingold and Merikle (1988, 1990) imply (see Fig. 1A). Crucially, because identication is the multidimensional distance between the detection vectors, at least one stimulus must be detectable for nonzero identication to occur. Thus, although identication can exceed detection with sufciently orthogonal stimuli, this is only possible with nonzero detection. Thus, SDT holds that detection is exhaustively sensitive to identication-relevant perception. This is why Macmillan (1986, p. 39) concluded that Above-chance recognition [i.e. identication] performance.when detection d 0 Z0 would be, for almost everyone, persuasive evidence for subliminal perception. Further, the fact that objective detection thresholds are below objective identication thresholds (see, e.g. Dagenbach, Carr, & Wilhelmsen, 1989) suggests that typical word stimuli reect highly correlated rather than orthogonal stimulus dimensions, and accordingly that overlapping and thus nondiscriminative lower-level stimulus information (e.g. darkness) can support detection but not identication. In contrast, identication will exceed zero only when nonoverlapping information is perceived (cf. Triesman, 1999).
3 Although it is possible to seek evidence for unconscious perception by contrasting performance on the same task across direct and indirect instructions, the few experiments using this approach have been unsuccessful (Reingold & Merikle, 1988).
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Fig. 1. (A) SDT two-dimensional representation of identication discriminations, illustrating identications dependence on and derivation from detection. The three circles represent the two-dimensional distributions of the noise only, A, and B stimuli. Each circle is one SD away from the mean of that distribution. 0 0 0 Identication d 0 (d1 ;2 ) is the distance between the detectability of stimulus A (d1 ) and B (d2 ). This distance 0 0 depends on both the magnitudes of d1 and d2 and the correlation between the stimulus A and B dimensions. 0 0 An idealized case is depicted here, wherein d1 and d2 are equal and the stimulus A and B dimensions are orthogonal. (B) Here, a more realistic depiction of the relationship between detection and identication is given, reecting the highly correlated (i.e. nonorthogonal) nature of typical word stimuli. Consequently, identication d 0 is smaller than detection d 0 . Moreover, at low levels of detection the stimulus A and B dimensions overlap completely. The internal dotted lines depict this situation, where identication d 0 exceeds zero only at substantial levels of detection d 0 .
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This more realistic nonorthogonal situation is depicted in Fig. 1B. Once again, then, identication should not be possible when detection d 0 Z0 if only conscious perceptual inuences are at work. 11.3. Application to the exhaustiveness, null sensitivity, and exclusiveness problems Notably, the SDT model predicts that detection and identication should be strongly and positively correlated. With detectable stimuli, this is exactly what occurs; for example, reanalysis of Haase, Theios, and Jenisons (1999) data (mean detection d 0 Z.61) revealed a correlation ofC.84. On the other hand, if detection is not exhaustively sensitive, either a weak positive correlation (if imperfectly exhaustive) or no relationship (if detection and identication indexed completely distinct forms of conscious perception) should occur. Similarly, the null sensitivity problem posits that putatively unconscious effects are actually weakly conscious, and thus that they would disappear if true null sensitivity was actually attained. With this in mind, it also predicts that the conscious and unconscious perception indexes should be positively correlated. Analogously, the exclusiveness problem also predicts a positive correlation (cf. Merikle & Reingold, 1998, p. 309). Otherwise, attaining null sensitivity on the conscious perception index would not reduce unconscious perception index effects, as feared.
12. The fundamental qualitative difference Given the above, skeptical concerns all make the same crucial predictionthat the conscious and unconscious perception indexes should correlate positively, or at least nonnegatively. More precisely, these alternative conscious-perception-only accounts predict that the size of the ostensibly unconscious effect (i.e. its absolute deviation from chance, whether positive or negative) should correlate positively, if at all, with the conscious perception indexand, in particular, that this should occur as stimulus intensity begins to exceed the relevant objective threshold. Accordingly, the most convincing evidence for an additional, unconscious perceptual process would accrue if the two indexes were negatively, rather than positively, correlated (for similar reasoning, see Eimer & Schleghacken, 2002; Klapp & Hinckley, 2002; Macleod, 1998). Indeed, we suggest elsewhere (Snodgrass, 2004b; in press; Snodgrass et al., 2004a) that such negative relationships provide strong qualitative differences because they directly contradict alternative conscious perception accounts. In contrast, positive relationships (e.g. nding partial word effects with weak stimuli versus whole-word effects with strong stimulicf. Abrams & Greenwald, 2000) yield only weak qualitative differences because they are interpretable in terms of weak versus strong conscious perception.
13. Experiment 2 The primary change in Experiment 2 was the addition of an SDT detection task following the unconscious perception index (identication) trials. By having the same
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participants provide both detection and identication information, we could test the crucial skeptical prediction just described. If a positive correlation is obtained, alternative conscious perception accounts become much more plausible. Conversely, nding a negative relationship would contradict such skeptical accounts, suggesting instead that the Preference!Strategy interaction is indeed due to unconscious perceptual processes. Further, nding any relationship would also imply that the conscious perception index was not simply invalid or insensitiveif so, no relationship should occur. Additionally, Experiment 2 changed when preference ratings were obtained. In all previous work, this was done following all identication trials. Because performance feedback was provided after each trial block, however, it was possible that preference ratings were inuenced by this feedback, rather than reecting independently existing attitudes towards the strategies. If so, results involving Preference could be artifactual. Although previous control experiments using blank stimuli and bogus feedback (Snodgrass et al., 1993a, Experiment 3; Van Selst & Merikle, 1993, Experiment 2) indicated that this was not the case, we felt the denitive control was to obtain preference ratings before the identication trials and without performance feedback. If these early preference ratings produced similar results, using the usual, late preference ratings would be justied, which were likely more accurate given participants greater experience with the strategies. Finally, Experiment 2 was also a large-scale replication, enabling further checks on the reliability of the just-claried looker facilitation effect, the crucial inhibition and Preference!Strategy effects, and previously established null detection sensitivity. 13.1. Participants, apparatus and materials, and procedure Forty-nine males and 50 females participated. Six additional participants were dropped because they did not follow instructions (e.g. showing extreme response biases). Three changes from our standard procedure were introduced. First, to obtain the early preference rating, participants used the strategies (pop and look, 12 trials each) on the 24trial practice block. After the practice trials, the usual preference inquiry was given. No feedback was provided to either the participants or the experimenter regarding practice block performance. Following the experimental trials, we additionally obtained late (standard) strategy preference, as usual. Second, following the identication trials, participants underwent a 32-trial SDT detection task with 16 word (the four words presented four times each) and 16 blank card trials; stimulus order was completely randomized. Participants said whether a word or blank was presented on each trial; identications were not requested. Participants were informed that words and blanks were presented with equal probability, and were urged to keep this in mind as they responded (i.e. to respond yes and no roughly equally). Third, identication stimulus order was now completely randomized within blocks (i.e. stimulus repetition constraints used in the prior experiments were dropped), eliminating any possible extraneous inuence of such constraints.
M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379 Table 3 Performance by Early or Late (standard) Preference and Strategy from Experiment 2 Preference rating type Early Strategy Preference Pop Look Pop 25.04 (3.96) (nZ67) 23.54a (3.76) (nZ32) Look 25.48 (4.38) 26.35a (3.04) Pop 25.50 (3.95) (nZ61) 23.03a (3.46) (nZ38) Late (standard) Strategy Look 25.45 (4.29) 26.27a (3.50)
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Standard deviations and ns are in parentheses. Mean performance is percentage correct collapsed across individual words (chanceZ25). a The 95% condence intervals of these means do not include 25 (chance).
13.2. Results 13.2.1. Identication Early preference and late (standard) preference results were similar (see Table 3). The early Preference!Strategy interaction was reliable, F(1,97)Z4.01, P!.05, as was the Strategy main effect, F(1,97)Z7.62, P!.01. Early preference lookers inhibited under pop instructions, F(1,31)Z4.81, P!.04, and facilitated under look instructions, F(1,31)Z 6.33, P!.02. We therefore concluded that previous Preference-related effects were not artifactual and used late (standard) preference in subsequent analyses. The standard Preference!Strategy interaction held, F(1,97)Z8.85, P!.004; as did the Strategy main effect, F(1,97)Z8.27, P!.005. Critically, lookers inhibited under pop instructions, F(1,37)Z12.35, P!.001, and also facilitated under look instructions, F(1,37)Z5.03, P! .04. However, poppers did not facilitate under pop instructions, F(1,60)Z1.00, ns. These ndings replicate the critical inhibition and novel facilitation effects, and again suggest that the Preference!Strategy interaction was carried by the looker simple effect. With this in mind, the Strategy main effect again seems secondary. 13.2.2. Detection Mean response bias was minimal (cZ.02), indicating that participants indeed distributed their yes and no responses equally. Hit rates ranged from .19 to .94; false alarms from .06 to .81. Because no zeros were obtained for the hits and false alarms, correction formulas were unnecessary, and d 0 could be computed in the usual manner. Overall detection performance (d 0 Z.05, SDZ.53) did not exceed chance, t(99)!1. Further, considered separately, neither poppers (d 0 Z.07, SDZ.57) nor lookers (d 0 Z.03, SDZ.47) exceeded chance (both ts!1). Thus, the current effects are indeed at the objective detection threshold, supporting the conclusion that both the looker facilitation effect and the inhibition effect are unconscious. As described above, however, examining mean detection d 0 alone still leaves room for skeptical doubts (e.g. null sensitivity concerns). Accordingly, we conducted a regression analysis which showed that d 0 was indeed negatively related to the Preference!Strategy interaction, contradicting skeptical
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Table 4 Performance by Preference and Strategypooled data from the original and current experiments Strategy Preference Pop (nZ139) Look (nZ105) Pop 25.74 (4.12) 23.06 (3.64) Look 24.71 (4.55) 26.40 (3.59)
Standard deviations and ns are in parentheses. Mean performance is percentage correct (chanceZ25). See text for signicance levels.
conscious perception predictions. For economy of exposition, we present this regression analysis, along with discussion of its methodological and substantive implications, in the General discussion below. 13.2.3. Final meta-analyses As before, experiment was initially included in the model to test for heterogeneity, but was again dropped because it was nonsignicant throughout, again indicating that any apparent differences between experiments were due to random rather than systematic factors. Table 4 presents the grand means collapsed across Experiment. Final metaanalyses including Experiment 2 (seven experiments in all) showed that looker inhibition under pop instructions was quite reliable, F(1,104)Z30.04, PZ2.98!10K7. Lookers also facilitated under look instructions, F(1,104)Z16.07, PZ1.14!10K4. Poppers facilitated weakly under pop instructions, F(1,138)Z4.53, PZ.035. The Preference!Strategy interaction was very reliable, F(1,242)Z36.23, PZ6.45!10K9, and the Strategy main effect was reliable, F(1,242)Z10.15, PZ.002. Further, when all detection ndings were cumulated (Snodgrass et al., 1993a, Experiment 3; Van Selst & Merikle, Experiment 3; the current Experiment 2), overall detection performance (7, 248 trials in all) was 49.9%, clearly at chance. This average is presented as percentage correct (PC) rather than d 0 because Van Selst and Merikles detection data were preserved only in the former form. Given the virtual absence of response bias in their (and our) data, PC is an adequate detection index. Clearly, then, the current effects are reliable and occur at the objective detection threshold. Further, they are substantive despite appearing small in raw units. For example, expressed as Cohens d, the effect size for the overall Preference!Strategy effect is .77. Examining the main constituents of this interaction, Cohens dZK.54 for looker inhibition under pop instructions, and dZ.39 for looker facilitation under look instructions. According to Cohens rules of thumb, these are moderate-to-large, not small, effects. By comparison, many standard cognitive effects also appear small in raw units (e.g. 3050 ms. semantic priming effects), but also possess moderate effect sizes. Moreover, it is unlikely that unpublished null ndings would substantially affect the current conclusions. For example, Rosenthals Fail-safe N for the overall Preference!Strategy effect is 83, meaning that 83 samples (with about 35 participants each) with null ndings would have to exist in order to render this effect nonsignicant.
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14. Discussion Here, we propose an explanation for the Preference!Strategy interaction; more general implications are addressed in the General discussion below. As perusal of Table 4 indicates, the overall pattern suggests a Preference/Strategy congruity effect. Given this pattern, the obtained effects may reect an unconscious attribution process. To begin with, the stimulus presentation on each trial presumably increases that words activation relative to the other response alternatives. However, whether this activation is attributed correctly to the words presentation depends on participants attitudes toward the strategies. When utilizing the strategy congruent with their preference, perhaps participants unconsciously allow this activation to inuence their response, elevating performance above chance. In contrast, when utilizing the incongruent strategy, such inuences are unconsciously rejected and below-chance performance ensues. This unconscious attribution explanation is analogous to those postulated in investigations involving perceptual uency (e.g. Whittlesea, 1993). The essence of such explanations is that the uency produced by prior stimulus presentation is unconsciously attributed to plausible, but not implausible, sources. There are, however, several important differences between typical uency attribution effects and the current effects. For example, typical uency stimuli are phenomenally conscious, albeit with some misdirection and/or diminished attention. At most, subjective threshold conditions are used. Here, the stimuli are objectively undetectable and thus unambiguously unconscious. Perhaps relatedly, our participants denied any phenomenal basis whatsoever for response selection. In contrast, in typical uency experiments, participants experience previously presented items as possessing distinctive phenomenal aspects (e.g. more familiar, clearer, etc.). Further, typical uency effects are usually indirect, involving erroneous attributions of uency to plausible but irrelevant stimulus dimensions. In contrast, the current attribution effects occur on a direct identication task. Finally, in typical uency experiments below chance performance is rarely, if ever, present; in contrast, such inhibition is prominent in the current experiments. Keeping these differences in mind, another (quite speculative) possibility is that looker inhibition might reect a simple form of unconscious defense (cf. Snodgrass et al., 1993a). Along these lines, lookers consistently expressed a strong preference for activity and control, explaining that they disliked doing nothing as the pop instructions required. Obliging lookers to relinquish conscious control with pop instructions might instantiate a mildly conictual situation, producing inhibition, whereas more congenial look instructions would not, yielding facilitation. In contrast, poppers expressed various, less striking motivations. Some true poppers believed that popping made sense; others deemed looking futile; still others simply said looking was too much work. In short, poppers appeared more heterogeneous, perhaps producing weak ndings.4 Consistent with this notion, poppers variance consistently exceeded lookers in our experiments. In
4 We also analyzed the most reliable poppers (i.e. those who consistently expressed preference for the pop strategy across both the early and late preference assessments) in an effort to obtain stronger popper effects; results were slightly but nonremarkably stronger.
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keeping with these apparent differences in motivational strength and consistency, the Preference/Strategy congruity effect was clearly strongest for lookers. At the same time, although much weaker, poppers displayed the opposite performance pattern, consistent with both the attribution and defense accounts. Importantly, the core structure of these accounts is similar; only the underlying motives differ (i.e. maintaining consistency versus maintaining conscious control). In any event, further work is clearly necessary to clarify the mechanisms for the current effects. Notably, both the attribution and defense accounts can explain looker inhibition. In contrast, standard cognitive inhibitory accounts are implausible because they require stimulus or response competition to produce and explain inhibitory effects (e.g. Stroop interference). For example, Milliken, Joordens, Merikle, and Seiffert (1998) showed that negative priming does not occur without response competition. In our paradigm, however, there is no stimulus or response competition. Further, Dagenbach and Carrs (1994) center-surround mechanism seems unlikely because it predicts maximal inhibition with increased effort and attention. We found the reverseinhibition with pop rather than look instructions. Moreover, center-surround theory predicts inhibition only for semantically related associates, not for the target words themselves. 14.1. Strategic factors mediate unconscious inuences In recent years, increasing evidence suggests that unconscious effects, long thought to be immune to strategic inuences, are in fact routinely mediated by them. Dagenbach et al. (1989), for example, showed that participants failed efforts to extract specically semantic information from undetectable primes produced inhibitory priming effects. Since then, many other strategic inuences on ostensibly automatic priming effects have been demonstrated. For example, semantic priming is severely curtailed if participants focus on the primes nonsemantic properties (e.g. Smith, Theodor, & Franklin, 1983; see Maxeld, 1997 for a review). More recently, Naccache, Blandin, and Dehaene (2002) have shown that unconscious masked priming requires temporal attention; analogously, Kentridge, Heywood, and Weiskrantz (1999) found that blindsight performance beneted from temporal cueing. In another example, Abrams and Greenwald (2000; see also Greenwald, Abrams, Naccache, & Dehaene, 2003) showed that whether or not a masked prime had been previously seen as a target mediated its effects. The current effects add to this previous work in two ways. First, analogous to the above, a strategic factornamely, whether pop or look strategies were adopted (cf. Dulanys, 1997 evocative versus deliberative distinction)crucially mediated unconscious perceptual inuences. Second, the current ndings make a relatively novel contribution in demonstrating the importance of individual differenceshere, participants strategy preference. Unlike strategic effects, individual difference inuences have hitherto received little study. Clearly, the current results suggest that further investigation of such inuences, and their interaction with strategic factors, is in order. Indeed, if they had not been examined, no results at all would have been obtained in the current studies.
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14.2. Unconscious inuences at the objective detection threshold are not short-lived Finally, Greenwald and associates (e.g. Greenwald, Draine, & Abrams, 1996) have argued that unconscious perceptual inuences are extremely short-lived, necessitating very highly speeded (cf. 400500 ms.) responses in order to capture their effects. In contrast, in the current paradigm responses were not speeded, and at least several seconds elapsed on each trial between the stimulus presentation and participants verbal response.5 Accordingly, although we did not time participants responses, it is clear that such inuences are not very short-lived, at least at the objective detection threshold.
15. General discussion In our view, the current, clearly reliable ndings exhibit qualitative differences, which have two major implications. First, they provide strong evidence against alternative conscious perception accounts. Second, they also suggest that objective and subjective threshold phenomena are likely fundamentally distinct, rather than the former simply being a weaker version of the latter. 15.1. Evidence contradicting the conscious-perception-only model Although we have already provided evidence that the Preference!Strategy interaction was not due to conscious perception, perhaps the clearest and most useful way to rule out such skeptical concerns is by utilizing the regression approach (cf. Draine & Greenwald, 1998). On the one hand, if conscious perception were actually responsible for the Preference!Strategy interaction, a positive relationship should manifest; moreover, the interaction should approach zero as null detection sensitivity is approached, producing a nonsignicant y-intercept. In contrast, negative relationships render conscious perceptual explanations for the Preference!Strategy interaction much less plausible because the interaction would diverge from rather than converge to zero as null detection sensitivity is approached, yielding a signicant y-intercept. The regression approach provides just such information (see Fig. 2). Interaction scores, plotted on the y-axis, were derived by subtracting each participants nonpreferred strategy performance from their preferred strategy performance. Accordingly, larger positive interaction scores indicate greater Preference/Strategy congruity effects. These scores were regressed onto detection d 0 , plotted on the x-axis. As Fig. 2 shows, detection was negatively, not positively, related to the Preference!Strategy interaction. This negative relationship (rZK.22) was signicant, t(98)ZK2.23, PZ.028. Moreover, the yRecall that in our paradigm, there is no apparent change in the visual display throughout the entire trial (i.e. no ash, mask, brightness change, etc.). Accordingly, in our procedure the experimenter rst alerted participants that a stimulus presentation was immanent, participants signaled their readiness, the stimulus was presented, participants were informed that the stimulus had just been presented, and nally participants responded. Thus, participants could not respond until after being told that that the stimulus had just been presented, creating a builtin delay of several seconds on each trial.
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Fig. 2. Regression of Preference!Strategy congruity effect (identication percentage correct performance in preferred minus nonpreferred strategy) on detection d 0 .
interceptthat is, the point estimate of the interaction where detection d 0 Z0was signicant; t(98)Z2.55, PZ.012. These results are particularly powerful because they are not subject to the usual criticisms of the regression method. First, unlike many applications (e.g. Draine & Greenwald, 1998), here there is a relationship between the conscious and unconscious perception indexes, thus allowing clearly valid use of the regression equation for predictive purposes (e.g. y-intercept estimation). Further, in situations where this relationship is negative and the means of both indexes are positive, as they are here, measurement error in the predictor underestimates yinterceptsexactly the reverse of the problematic overestimation which occurs when the relationship is positive. Accordingly, one need not be concerned about correcting for predictor measurement error because such error works against, rather than in favor of, obtaining signicant y-intercepts. Consequently, these regression results indicate that the Preference! Strategy interaction was signicant (indeed, maximal) when detection d 0 was clearly zero clearly ruling out alternative conscious perception accounts. 16. But what does the negative relationship mean? Above and beyond its salutatory methodological import, however, one might wonder about the substantive meaning of the negative relationship. To begin with, obtaining any
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relationship at all between the Preference!Strategy interaction and detection indicates that systematic variance is present in the latter as well as the former, despite the obtained null detection sensitivity. With this in mind, such variation could be due to conscious or unconscious perceptual inuences on detection. 16.1. Conscious inuences on detection? First, it could be that some participants indeed possessed very small amounts of conscious detection, but that the obtained detection d 0 did not signicantly exceed zero either because the extant conscious perception was too weak (leading to low power) and/or obscured by measurement error (cf. the null sensitivity problem). Crucially, however, the above regression analysis indicates that such weak conscious detection could not account for the Preference!Strategy effect, given the latters presence even when detection d 0 Z0. Moreover, if very weak conscious detection was indeed present, the observed negative relationship is predicted by our recently proposed objective threshold/strategic model (see, e.g. Snodgrass, 2004a; in press; Snodgrass et al., 2004a,b; see also Bernat, Shevrin, & Snodgrass, 2001). Although space reasons prevent a full discussion, our review of unconscious perception research suggests that reliable effects occur at the objective detection threshold (ODT), but that null ndings usually obtain at the objective identication threshold (OIT). For example, Dagenbach et al. (1989) and Klinger and Greenwald (1995) repeatedly obtained this pattern. Along these lines, is it important to note that Cheesman and Merikles (1984) inuential null ndings were actually obtained under OIT, not ODT, conditions. Notably, prior reviews have conated ODT and OIT studies, leading to the erroneous conclusion that objective threshold effects are unreliable. Crucially, because the ODT occurs at briefer stimulus durations than the OIT, this pattern amounts to a negative correlation between the conscious and unconscious perception indexes in the ODT-OIT region. We interpret these negative relationships as suggesting that conscious and unconscious perceptions exert functionally exclusive inuences on performance, such that the former override the latter when both are present. When conscious perception is virtually absent, which occurs only at the ODT, reliable unconscious perceptual effects are readily obtainable, as in the current experiments. At stimulus intensities between the ODT and OIT, the crucial stimuli are consciously detectable; however, this overriding conscious perception is not yet sufcient to support higher-level (i.e. identication-dependent) effects. Consequently, a negative relationship between stimulus detectability and unconscious perception effects occurs in the ODT-OIT region.6 For example, we (Bernat et al., 2001) recently investigated unconscious P300
Importantly, our review suggests that ODT-OIT negative relationships occur only when participants regard their conscious perceptions as relevant. Although this seems to occur frequently even with nominally indirect measures, there are exceptions. For example, conscious perception may also become irrelevant when indirect task parameters do not allow sufcient time to attend to the primes. This could account for the at regression slopes characteristic of Greenwald and associates (e.g. Abrams & Greenwald, 2000; Draine & Greenwald, 1998; Klinger, Burton, & Pitts, 2000) response window experiments, which force very rapid responding (400 ms).
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oddball effects (i.e. greater brain wave amplitude to rare rather than frequent stimuli) using visual stimuli. With supraliminal stimuli, P300 oddball effects are a classic psychophysiological effect (Pritchard, 1981). Here, we used ODT stimuli (mean detection d 0 Z.10); moreover, detection and the oddball effect were negatively related (rZK.44, P!.05), and the y-intercept was signicant (P!.0005). Conversely, as stimulus intensity surpasses the OIT (i.e. to the subjective identication threshold and beyond), higher-level task performance also increases. Beyond the OIT, then, conscious and unconscious perception index performance is positively related, consistent with the hypothesis that conscious perception now exclusively drives performance. For example, P300 oddball effects correlate positively, not negatively, with stimulus discriminability with supra-OIT stimuli (Pritchard, 1981). Similarly, Cheesman and Merikle (1984) found a strong positive relationship (rZ.71) between semantic priming and identication, with null effects at the OIT. 16.2. Unconscious inuences on detection? On the other hand, the current negative relationship may stem from unconscious rather than conscious perceptual inuences on detection. Given that overall detection d 0 did not exceed zero, such unconscious inuences would most likely be exclusively bidirectional, just as they are with identication (cf. the Preference!Strategy interaction)that is, underlying mediating factors are systematically producing both facilitation and inhibition on detection performance.7 Unlike identication, however, the mediating factors for detection are as yet unknown, and do not appear to include Preference and Strategy (cf. Van Selst & Merikle, 1993, Experiment 3; see above). In any case, whether unconscious inuences on detection are exclusively bidirectional or (less likely) weakly unidirectional, it is not clear why detection would be negatively related to bidirectional identication effects. In any event, however, these all-unconscious scenarios do not threaten the unconscious status of the Preference!Strategy interaction. 16.3. Could the current effects be weak subjective threshold effects? Merikle and Daneman (2000) (see also Merikle et al., 2001) suggest that subjective and objective threshold approaches index the same underlying constructphenomenal awarenessand that objective threshold effects are simply conservative subjective threshold effects. Relatedly, their formulation of the exclusiveness problem suggests that reducing direct task performance should reduce unconscious inuences generally.
Some researchers have found the idea of negative detection d 0 s strange or nonsensical (cf. Greenwald et al., 1995), but this is likely because it is often implicitly assumed that detection is exclusively sensitive to conscious perceptual inuences. Indeed, below-chance performance due to conscious perception is quite implausible in most circumstances (cf. Snodgrass, 2004a); this is one reason why we believe that, for example, looker inhibition in the current experiments is likely due to unconscious rather than conscious inuences. Conversely, there are no special problems with understanding below-chance detection performance in some individuals as caused by unconscious inhibitory processes despite conscious intentions to facilitate, just as we have suggested regarding below-chance identication performance for lookers under pop instructions.
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Accordingly, subjective threshold models, similar to weak conscious perception models, predict that effects should weaken and nally disappear as zero detectability is approached. With this in mind, the above regression analysis, with its negative relationship and signicant y-intercept, refutes subjective threshold interpretations as well. It could be objected that comparing the current ndings with subjective threshold effects is unfounded because we did not include a subjective threshold condition. Along these lines, one could argue that Preference!Strategy interactions might be found under subjective as well as objective threshold conditions, and hence that both paradigms might ultimately yield qualitatively similar effects after all. The argument is weak, however, for several reasons. Perhaps most importantly, the essential qualitative difference between the current objective threshold effects and subjective threshold effects is not the obtained bidirectional Preference!Strategy interaction, but rather the complete absence of unidirectional effects on identication. (Of course, given this absence, it is crucial that the bidirectional effects occurred; otherwise, there would be no ndings to discuss.) In contrast, subjective threshold conditions invariably produce powerful unidirectional effects. Thus, even though we cannot say what would happen if Preference!Strategy effects were examined under subjective threshold conditions (but see below), we can compare unidirectional effects in the current experiments with those found in subjective threshold paradigms. With this in mind, the subjective threshold interpretation makes the strong prediction that at least weak undirectional effects on overall identication should have been found in the current experiments. Indeed, this was perfectly possiblethat is, overall identication could have exceeded chance under ODT conditions, just as it does quite robustly under subjective threshold conditions (e.g. 66% on 4AFC identicationsee Cheesman & Merikle, 1984). Further, because unidirectional and bidirectional inuences are statistically orthogonal, both kinds of effects could have occurred (cf. Katz, 2001)that is, the presence of the latter does not entail the absence of the former. Instead, however, in the current experiments overall 4AFC identication performance was right at chance (XZ 25.01, NZ244). Moreover, the current bidirectional effects strength (Cohens dZ.77) demonstrates that this lack of undirectional effects was not due to generally weak unconscious inuences, rendering their absence all the more compelling. Conceivably, however, one could argue that even stronger Preference!Strategy effects would be found under subjective threshold conditions, and hence that our ndings could reect both weaker unidirectional and bidirectional unconscious perceptual inuences. The obtained negative relationship, however, contradicts this conjecture. Indeed, because subjective threshold conditions involve much stronger stimuli, this negative relationship suggests that the bidirectional effects would be eliminated altogether under such conditions. Finally, as described above, in general subjective threshold effects correlate positively, not negatively, with stimulus discriminability. One could object, however, that the current bidirectional identication effects are unusual, thereby weakening the interpretive signicance of the negative relationship in this situation. With this in mind, consider only the facilitative effects in the current Experiment 3that is, looker facilitation under look instructions and popper facilitation under pop instructions. Collectively, this performance (XZ25.80, NZ99) exceeded chanceone-sample t(99)Z2.10, PZ.038.
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Fig. 3. Regression of Congruent Strategy Only effect (identication percentage correct performance in preferred strategy only minus chance performance) on detection d 0 .
These above-chance effects seem to resemble weak subjective threshold effects, apparently consistent with subjective threshold model predictions. Once again, however, a regression analysis contradicts this interpretation (see Fig. 3). Identication facilitation was negatively related to detectionrZK.219; t(98)ZK2.21, PZ.03; moreover, the yintercept was signicant; t(98)Z2.36, PZ.02. In contrast, it is rmly established that subjective threshold identication effects are positively related to detection (e.g. Haase et al., 1999; see also above).
17. Unconscious perception and conscious control Perhaps the most widely held qualitative difference hypothesis regarding conscious versus unconscious perception is that responses to conscious, but not unconscious, perceptions can be consciously controlled. In our view, there are good reasons to believe that subjective threshold effects are at least potentially controllable, whereas the current objective threshold effects are notyielding another reason to believe that the two paradigms index fundamentally distinct constructs.
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17.1. Subjective threshold approaches and conscious control The SDT critique suggests that subjective threshold effects could be caused by belowcriterion but nonetheless weakly conscious perception. With this in mind, above-chance subjective threshold performance can be interpreted as demonstrating conscious control over responding to such stimuli. As mentioned above, however, some argue that this above-chance performance does not reect true intentional control, but rather some kind of automatic inuence on response selection. Evidence supporting this claim has been obtained from exclusion paradigms (derived from Jacobys, 1991, process-dissociation approach), which instruct participants not to complete word stems with endings that match previously presented intact words. As Merikle and associates (e.g. Merikle & Joordens, 1997a,b; Merikle et al., 1995) have repeatedly demonstrated, when the initial intact words are presented under subjective threshold conditions, word stems are completed with matching endings above baseline levels despite these instructions. They conclude that this exclusion failure demonstrates unconscious perception, arguing that conscious perception would result in the application of conscious control, producing successful exclusion instead. However, exclusion failure can also be interpreted as a criterion artifact if one postulates that exclusion itself is a decision process, and thus that candidate word completions will be excluded only when participants have sufcient condence that they have identied the initial, masked words (see Snodgrass, 2002; see also Haase & Fisk, 2001). Paralleling the traditional subjective threshold critique, exclusion failure could thus reect facilitation produced by below-criterion but weakly conscious stimuli. By this account, it is not that participants cannot control their responses to subjective threshold stimuli on direct tasks, but simply that they usually do not attempt to do so due to low condence. This SDT-based interpretation predicts that subjective threshold stimuli could be excluded if sufciently lenient exclusion criteria are adopted. Supporting this prediction, Visser and Merikle (1999) recently found that exclusion failure disappeared when nancial incentives were offered for successful exclusion. Without such incentives, exclusion failure occurred. Other exclusion-related qualitative differences reported thus far (standard versus reverse priming; false recognitioncf. Merikle & Joordens, 1997a,b; Merikle et al., 1995) are similarly interpretable in conscious perceptual terms. Specically, these qualitative differences all involve the failure to apply some metacognitive response strategy with subjective threshold stimuli, and the successful application of such strategies with clearly visible stimuli (Snodgrass, 2002; see also Block, 2001). Accordingly, these qualitative differences have the same underlying structure as exclusion failure versus success, which also involves the application (or not) of a metacognitive response strategynamely, exclusion. All in all, then, there is no compelling evidence as yet that direct subjective threshold effects are intrinsically uncontrollable. 17.2. Objective threshold approaches and conscious control Conversely, the current effects reect lack of conscious control in a more radical manner. Unlike the powerful facilitation obtained in subjective threshold approaches,
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overall performance is right at chance, just as one would expect if conscious control were absent. Moreover, the Preference!Strategy interaction possesses further features which suggest the absence of conscious controlmost strikingly, the below-chance performance by lookers under pop instructions. This inhibition effect reects what could be called inclusion failure, or even inclusion reversalthat is, it occurs despite inclusion instructions (i.e. to respond correctly). Unlike subjective threshold exclusion failure, this dramatic effect cannot be readily explained as a criterion artifact. As an attempt, one might imagine that lookers, perhaps distrusting pop instructions, dismiss their (here, weakly conscious) perceptions as strange or anomalous, producing inhibitionin effect, a spontaneous and successful exclusion strategy. However, exclusion paradigms themselves suggest that this explanation is untenable, because their core nding (cf. Debner & Jacoby, 1994; Merikle et al., 1995) is precisely that participants still facilitate, even with much stronger subjective threshold stimuli and despite express exclusion instructions. Rather, successful exclusion occurs only with clearly visible stimuli. In contrast, our stimuli are much weaker (undetectable) and participants receive facilitation instructions. Thus, a conscious perception explanation for the inhibition effect seems implausible. But what about the looker facilitation effect under look instructions? Might this reect conscious control applied to weakly conscious stimuli? If so, one would expect this facilitation to correlate positively with detection; as noted earlier, detection and identication are strongly and positively related with both suprathreshold and subjective threshold stimuli. Instead, however, looker facilitation exhibits the strongest negative relationship with detection of any cell (rZK.31, P!.06). Given that conscious perceptual explanations for the inhibition and facilitation effects are implausible, then, these effects are better understood as reecting uncontrollable unconscious attributional processes, which mediate unconscious perceptual inuences on performance. Finally, it is important to distinguish between controllable and uncontrollable forms of strategic mediation of unconscious inuences. Just now, we have suggested that subjective but not objective threshold inuences are at least potentially consciously controllable that is, participants can selectively and exibly control their responses to the former but not the latter. At the same time, as discussed previously, the current ndings join many others (e.g. Dagenbach et al., 1989) in showing that consciously adopted strategies do mediate unconscious inuences. This kind of mediation, however, does not involve selective conscious control, but rather produces various nonvolitional or even countervolitional effects (e.g. looker inhibition under pop instructions).
18. Objective versus subjective threshold approaches index qualitatively distinct processes Given the foregoing, three independent qualitative differences convergently suggest that objective and subjective threshold approaches likely index fundamentally distinct processes. First, under objective threshold conditions, direct tasks exhibit no unidirectional component, but rather only bidirectional effects; in contrast, subjective threshold effects invariably include
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prominent unidirectional inuences on direct tasks.8 Second, objective threshold (i.e. ODT) effects are typically negatively correlated with effective stimulus intensity, whereas subjective threshold effects are positively correlated.9 Third, objective threshold inuences on direct tasks are radically uncontrollable, whereas subjective threshold inuences on direct tasks are potentially controllable. If, as these qualitative differences suggest, objective and subjective threshold methods indeed index distinct phenomena, it is necessary to carefully distinguish between them because effects obtained in the two paradigms may differ importantly. In particular, it should not be assumed that subjective threshold effects simply reect unconscious inuences in general, as is typically done.
19. Relevance to the tension between objective and subjective threshold approaches The theoretical tension between objective and subjective threshold approaches, discussed above, derives from the exclusiveness problem, which seems to imply that all unconscious inuences should decrease to zero as objective thresholds are approached. Perhaps, however, this applies only to subjective threshold effects; in contrast, objective threshold effects become larger, not smaller, as the ODT is approached. If objective and subjective threshold phenomena indeed qualitatively differ in this way, the apparent conict between them is removed. In particular, one need not assume that direct measures are exclusively sensitive to conscious inuences in order for ODT effects to be genuine, because objective threshold effects exhibit negative, not positive, relationships. If turn, if the exclusiveness assumption is unnecessary, the reality of ODT effects no longer implies that subjective threshold phenomena are necessarily phenomenally conscious.
20. Objective thresholds, subjective thresholds, and phenomenal awareness If the two methods indeed index distinct processes, what kind(s) of awareness do they index? To begin with, because objective threshold methods are more stringent, almost everyone would view such effects (if genuine) as phenomenally unconscious. In view of the above qualitative differences, however, one could question whether subjective threshold effects are phenomenally unconscious. Indeed, with normal populations, the only clearly established qualitative differences between subjective threshold and suprathreshold phenomena involve various demonstrations that consciously controlled
Although there have been few other investigations of unconscious perceptual inuences on direct tasks using objective threshold paradigms since Holenders (1986) review, the available evidence suggests that this bidirectionality may be a general property. For example, Price (1990, 1998) had participants make 2AFC semantic category and SDT detection discriminations at various prime-mask SOAs. As SOAs became more stringent, semantic discrimination fell to chance; at still shorter SOAs, detection fell to chance. At the objective detection threshold, however, semantic discriminations exhibited increased variancethe hallmark of bidirectional effects. 9 Our review (e.g. Snodgrass et al., 2004a,b) suggests that this is so not only for direct unconscious perception indexes, the focus of this article, but for indirect unconscious perception indexes (e.g. semantic priming) as well, excepting very highly speeded tasks (cf. footnote 6).
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response strategies are applied to the latter but not the former. Otherwise, they behave similarly (i.e. exhibit unidirectional direct measure effects and positive relationships with stimulus intensity). At the same time, whether or not such strategic processes are applied has truly substantive consequences, as exclusion paradigms clearly show. Accordingly, we propose that objective threshold approaches index phenomenal awareness, and that subjective threshold approaches index an additional form of consciousnessnamely, higher-order reective awareness (cf. Snodgrass, 2002; in press; Snodgrass et al., 2004a, b). In this framework, objective threshold methods index phenomenally unconscious perception, whereas subjective threshold methods index phenomenally conscious but reectively unconscious perception. From this perspective, there are two substantive senses, not just one, in which perception can be conscious: (1) phenomenal consciousness, which refers to experiential (e.g. perceptual) contents and qualia per se, and (2) reective consciousness, which is a higher-order metacognitive process involving reecting upon and evaluating various phenomenal contents. This distinction resembles Blocks (1995; and especially 2001) differentiation between phenomenal and access consciousness, and implies a hierarchical tripartite taxonomy: (1) completely unconscious perceptions, which have no representation in phenomenal or reective consciousness, (2) phenomenally conscious but reectively unconscious perceptions, and (3) both phenomenally and reectively conscious perceptions.10 Accordingly, although all reectively conscious perceptions are also phenomenally conscious, the converse does not hold. Rather, reective consciousness is a highly capacity-limited subsystem, which selects only the most relevant phenomenally conscious contents for further, higher-level strategic processing. Along these lines, although only a relatively small subset of phenomenally conscious contents are reectively conscious at any given time, any phenomenally conscious perception can be selected for inclusion in reective consciousness. Accordingly, there are no phenomenally conscious perceptions that are intrinsically reectively unconscious. In contrast, phenomenally unconscious perceptions are intrinsically unconscious in both senses.11 In our view, this framework reconciles apparently contradictory features of subjective threshold phenomena. Most importantly, it explains how these phenomena really are unconscious in an important sense, and yet how their reectively conscious/unconscious status is not immutable. To begin with, under normal circumstances, participants are reectively unconscious of subjective threshold stimuli because they do not believe (i.e. have very low condence) that they can perceive
10 Related proposals have recently been made by various researchers, including Lambie and Marcel (2002) and Schooler (2002). Such proposals typically stress the utility of differentiating between rst-order (phenomenal) and second-order (reective) consciousness, but do not additionally recognize the existence of phenomenally unconscious perception. 11 Obviously, participants have various phenomenal experiences, even under objective threshold conditions, throughout their performance. Such experiences, however, are only germane when they concern relevant awarenessthat is, veridical awareness of the relevant stimuli, rather than endogenously produced variations in visual experience or irrelevant exogenous inuences, such as random uctuations engendered by the experimental equipment. When d 0 is zero, there is no such relevant awareness.
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them. Accordingly, such stimuli are typically ignored, but nonetheless exert various inuences unnoticed and unmodied by reective consciousness and its tools (i.e. higher-level response strategies). At the same time, when sufciently motivated, participants can lower their criterion and include such stimuli in reective consciousness, thereby enabling conscious control over response. If this interpretation is correct, the above considerations moreover illustrate how phenomenal and reective consciousness can be empirically distinguished. As Block (2001) noted, one might worry that this was impossible, reasoning that any inquiry to participants regarding their phenomenal states confounds the two. That is, it might seem that participants can only report phenomenal states that they are (additionally) reectively aware of; hence, denials of awareness seem intrinsically ambiguous (i.e. could reect either the absence of reective awareness only, or phenomenal awareness as well). In the current framework, however, phenomenal and reective consciousness can, broadly speaking, be differentiated by SDTnamely, by d 0 and the criterion (c), respectively. On the one hand, reective consciousness can be ascertained by simply asking participants if they can see the stimulithat is, by utilizing subjective threshold methods, which are intrinsically criterion-based. On the other hand, phenomenal consciousness can be ascertained by having participants attempt to discriminate the stimulithat is, by utilizing objective threshold methods, which are intrinsically sensitivity-based. Notably, from this perspective, participants can report phenomenal states that they are not (i.e. would not ordinarily be) reectively aware ofnamely, by performing forced-choice discrimination tasks, which compel participants to respond to stimuli that they would otherwise ignore (i.e. to include below-criterion stimuli in reective consciousness). Moreover, as suggested above, objective and subjective threshold phenomena exhibit qualitative differences, which convergently support their empirical differentiation. On the other hand, it could be objected that d 0 seems entirely behavioral, with no necessary connection with participants phenomenal states (cf. Jack & Shallice, 2001; Merikle & Daneman, 2000; Merikle et al., 2001)and hence that above-zero ds do not necessarily imply phenomenal awareness. Strictly speaking, we agree. However, as even subjective threshold advocates agree (see, e.g. Cheesman & Merikle, 1986; Merikle et al., 1995), assuming that subjective threshold stimuli are phenomenally unconscious is unjustied unless converging qualitative differences can be demonstratedperhaps most importantly, by showing that such stimuli produce uncontrollable effects. As suggested above, however, recent evidence (Haase & Fisk, 2001; Snodgrass, 2002) suggests that conscious control may be possible with such stimuli after all. At this stage, perhaps the safest conclusion is that it is not yet clear whether conscious control is possible with such stimuli, and hence whether subjective threshold stimuli are phenomenally conscious or not. Accordingly, it is important to stress that neither SDT nor the qualitative differences between objective and subjective threshold phenomena demand the conclusion that the latter are phenomenally conscious. Indeed, it is certainly possible that both objective and subjective threshold effects are phenomenally unconscious, and that they reect qualitatively distinct forms (e.g. Type I and Type II) of such completely unconscious processes. There are good reasons to take this possibility seriously; for example, many
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neuropsychological syndromes (e.g. blindsight, visual neglect) produce unidirectional effects on direct task performance (i.e. subjective threshold effects) despite apparently convincing evidence that phenomenal awareness is absent.12 Space constraints do not allow further discussion of these phenomena here; accordingly, for now we simply agree that such effects, and indeed subjective threshold effects generally, could be phenomenally unconscious. Indeed, it may be inherently quite difcult to determine whether subjective threshold phenomena are phenomenally but not reectively conscious, as we tentatively propose, or whether subjective threshold stimuli are phenomenally unconscious, but can perhaps be rendered weakly conscious by the application of reective processes. That is, it is unclear whether reective processes simply enable the strategic use of (already) phenomenally conscious stimuli, as in our proposal, or whether reective processes actually endow subjective threshold stimuli with phenomenal awareness (cf. Jack & Shallice, 2001; see also Weiskrantz, 1997). Whatever their ultimate status, however, the current ndings suggest that subjective and objective threshold phenomena qualitatively differ, and hence that the two should be distinguished.
Acknowledgements This research was undertaken as part of a research program on conscious and unconscious processes in the Ormond and Hazel Hunt Memorial Laboratory, directed by Howard Shevrin and supported in part by gifts from Robert Berry. Special thanks to Mark Van Selst, Philip Merikle, and Steven Haase for making their raw data available. We also thank John Thompson for preparing the artwork.
References
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Cognition 101 (2006) 4379 www.elsevier.

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

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M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

M. Snodgrass, H. Shevrin / Cognition 101 (2006) 4379

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