W11_lec1 Flashcards
(15 cards)
What are the two meanings of “consciousness”?
Wakefulness – being awake and aware of surroundings
Subjective experience – personal, qualitative aspects of mental life
What is the “easy problem” of consciousness?
Questions about mechanisms of conscious experience, e.g., brain regions involved, how awareness is measured, etc.
What is the “hard problem” of consciousness?
Why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience (e.g., the experience of “blue”).
What is the Dissociation Method in unconscious perception research?
A method showing that a stimulus can influence behavior even when the person reports not being consciously aware of it.
What did Sidis (1898) demonstrate?
Participants could still identify letters/digits better than chance even when they claimed they couldn’t see them.
What was Marcel’s key finding about semantic priming under the objective threshold?
Participants judged semantically related words correctly even when they could not consciously detect the prime word.
What did Marcel’s Stroop effect study show?
Reaction times were slower when color patches were preceded by incongruent color words, even if the words were not consciously perceived.
What is the Exclusiveness assumption?
That the awareness measure only reflects conscious processing (but unconscious processes may also influence results).
What is the Exhaustiveness assumption?
That the awareness measure captures all of conscious processing (but it may not).
What is the critique of dissociation methods?
No measure is process-pure; both conscious and unconscious processes may influence performance.
What was the main method used by Debner & Jacoby (1994)?
Word-stem completion in an exclusion condition—participants were told not to use the flashed word to complete a stem.
What did Debner & Jacoby (1994) find?
When the word was processed unconsciously (short exposure), participants were more likely to mistakenly complete the stem using the primed word—suggesting automatic influence.
What was varied in the Cheesman & Merikle (1986) study?
The proportion of congruent trials (33% vs. 66%) and the stimulus duration (subliminal vs. supraliminal).
What did they find about awareness and congruency?
The Stroop effect was influenced by proportion congruency only when the word was consciously processed, not when presented below awareness.
