This is a very detailed summary on Chapter 8 - Conscious & Unconscious of the Consciousness book (S.Blackmore) Third Edition
If you read the summary you do not need to read the book
The distinction between conscious and unconscious is often likened to that between mind and
body: we tend to talk about conscious processes into which we feel we have full insight, as mental
ones and about unconscious processes which remain opaque to use as embodied
Idea that the mind is divided into parts - traced back to early Hindu texts or ancient Egyptian
beliefs about sleep and dreams
Plato: gave the soul 3 parts: reason, spirit and appetite, all with their own goals and abilities
Westernern literature (Shakspeare and Coleridge): “highest” faculty (reason) thought of separate
from the body & instinct = understood as a bas, bodily function which connects us with other
animals
Focus shifted from pats of mind to mechanisms & distinct types of processing going on in one brain
Helmholt’s idea of “unconscious inference”
William james: distinction between associative and true reasoning
More recent: debates over subliminal perception, unconscious processing and dual process
theories
- Dual-process theories (most) suggest 1 process= fast, automatic, inflexible, effortless and
dependent on context, 1 process = slow, effortful, controlled, flexible, requires working
memory and independent of context
UNCONSCIOUS PERCEPTION
Earliest demonstrations of perception without consciousness: (Peirce and Jastrow) studied how
well could discriminate different weights by judging the amount of pressure made on the
forefinger or middle finger by the end of the beam of a weighing scale
- 2 were so closely matched that had no confidence if could tell them apart & from the
guesses they did better than chance
Sidis: showed volunteers letters or digits on cards so far away they could barely see them, let alone
identify them - when asked to guess: did better than chance
Concluded: results show the presence within us of a secondary subwaking self that perceives
things which the primary waking self is unable to get at
- Even if reject his notion of 2 selves - results seemed to demonstrate unconscious
perception BUT resistance to this possibility = strong
→ Both of these cases, people deny consciously detecting something while their behavior shows
they have d etected it
(Dan Wegner) “subliminal self” - implies the existence of its alter ego: a real or conscious self which
is capable of fine thoughts and freely willed actions
- When there’s talk of automatic behavior, unconscious processes or subliminal effects:
there’s an implicit comparison with conscious processes but remain entirely unexplained
- “Psychology’s continued dependence on some version of a conscious self makes it suspect
as a science”
In early experiments: conscious perception defined in terms of what people said
Problem:
a) whether people say they have consciously seen something depends on how cautious
they’re being
Signal detection theory:
Mathematical
Requires 2 variables to explain how people detect things (sounds, flashes of lights)
1 var: (d’) = person’s sensitivity
β= response criterion (how willing they are to say ‘yes, I see it’ when they are unsure)
, - These two can vary independently of each other.
Without their realising it & with same
sensitivity - people can apply
different criterion
No fixed threshold that separates the
things that are “really seen” or really
experienced from those that are not
Implies: difficulty with the idea that
things are unequivocally either “in”
consciousness or “out” of
consciousness and makes the
concept of subliminal and
supraliminal perception -- more complicated
b) Behaviourist suspicion of verbal reports
i) Wanting more reliable, objective measures of consciousness
ii) If all obkective measures of discrimination are takeen as evidence of conscious
percpetion, then evidence for unconscious perception seems to be ruled out by
definition
1970-1980 - objections prompted progress in research methods and theory
Basic requirement: demonstrate a dissociation between 2 measures: direct (to indicate conscious
perception) and indirect (to indicate unconscious perception)
Semantic priming (Marcel):
One word (prime) influences the response to a second word (target)
- E.g: if prime and target word are semantically related - recognition of the target is faster
people’s word recognition → affected by primes they did not see: when asked to say whether a
word had been presented before the target one, or to guess the masked word, their verbal
responses shows they’re unaware of the words’ presence.
Controversy: while some people successfully replicated the effects, others failed to
Solved controversy (Cheesman & Merikle): p roposed distinction between “objective threshold” and
“subjective threshold”
- “Objective threshold”: the detection level at which perceptual info is actually discriminated
at a chance level
- Subjective threshold: the detection level at which subjects claim not to be able to
discriminate perceptual info at better than chance level (higher than objective)
Used - Stroop-priming task
Participants name colour after being primed with a color word for different time lengths
- Congruent color words - reduce reaction time
- Incongruent words - increase it
Measured participants objective threshold with reliable 4-alternative forced-choice procedure &
their subjective threshold bs asking them to judge their own ability to discriminate the words
Found: priming effect (evidence for unconscious perception) when the length of time between the
prime and the mask was below the subjective threshold but none at all when below the objective
threshold
Conclusion: unconscious perception occurs primarily when info is presented below the subjective
threshold but above objective threshold
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