Department of Psychology and Program in Neuroscience, Amherst College.
McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Psychol Sci. 2023 Sep;34(9):1033-1047. doi: 10.1177/09567976231186798. Epub 2023 Aug 31.
Does sensory information reach conscious awareness in a discrete, all-or-nothing manner or a gradual, continuous manner? To answer this question, we examined behavioral performance across four different paradigms that manipulate visual awareness: the attentional blink, backward masking, the Sperling iconic memory paradigm, and retro-cuing. We then asked how well we could account for participants' ( = 112 adults) behavior using a signal detection framework that factors in psychophysical scaling to model participants' responses along a single continuum. We found that this model easily accounted for the data from each of these diverse paradigms. Moreover, we reanalyzed the data from prior studies that had posited a discrete view of perceptual awareness and found that our continuous signal detection model outperformed the models that had been used to support an all-or-nothing view of consciousness. This set of data is consistent with the idea that conscious awareness occurs along a graded continuum.
感觉信息是以离散的、全有或全无的方式还是渐进的、连续的方式到达意识意识？为了回答这个问题，我们研究了四个不同的范式，这些范式操纵了视觉意识：注意瞬脱、后向掩蔽、Sperling 表象记忆范式和回溯提示。然后，我们询问我们使用信号检测框架来解释参与者的行为的程度，该框架考虑心理物理比例来沿着单一连续统对参与者的反应进行建模。我们发现，该模型很容易解释这些不同范式的数据。此外，我们重新分析了先前提出离散知觉意识观点的研究的数据，发现我们的连续信号检测模型优于支持意识全有或全无观点的模型。这组数据与这样一种观点一致，即意识意识是沿着一个渐变的连续统发生的。
