W11_lec2 Flashcards
(10 cards)
What are the main questions of consciousness in cognitive psychology?
How can we best measure conscious experience?
Does information we’re unaware of still influence our behavior?
What is the dissociation method for studying unconscious perception?
It compares two measures:
Measure 1: Conscious awareness (e.g., “Did you see a word? No.”)
Measure 2: Influence of stimulus (e.g., “What word was shown? Umm… dog?”) If people deny awareness but still show influence, it suggests unconscious perception.
What did Sidis (1898) find about unconscious perception?
Participants reported no awareness of letters/digits but still identified them above chance in forced-choice tasks.
Conclusion: Perception can occur without conscious awareness.
What is the difference between subjective and objective thresholds in perception?
Subjective Threshold: Based on participants’ self-report (“I saw/didn’t see it”), prone to bias.
Objective Threshold: Based on performance (chance-level accuracy), more reliable for detecting unconscious perception.
What were Marcel’s (1980) key findings on unconscious perception?
Even at chance-level detection, people could judge which word was semantically related.
Stroop-like effect: Reaction times were slower when preceded by incongruent, unconscious words.
Conclusion: Unconscious perception can influence semantic processing and behavior.
What are the problems with the dissociation method?
Exclusiveness: Assumes only conscious processes affect the measure.
Exhaustiveness: Assumes the measure captures all conscious processing.
Reality: Measures often reflect both conscious and unconscious processes.
What did Debner & Jacoby (1994) show about awareness and word completion?
Exclusion task: Avoid completing stems with shown words.
Under unconscious perception (short duration), participants still used primed words.
With conscious awareness (longer duration), participants avoided primed words.
Conclusion: Consciousness enables control over automatic responses.
What did Cheesman & Merikle (1986) find about conscious processing and Stroop effects?
When the prime was consciously processed, the Stroop effect depended on the proportion of congruent trials.
Conclusion: Conscious perception allows strategic adaptation; unconscious does not.
What did Mack & Rock (1998) discover about attention and awareness?
Diverting attention away reduced awareness of words.
Yet, word meanings still influenced word stem completion (e.g., “Fla___” → “Flake” or “Freak”).
Conclusion: Unconscious processing occurs even when attention is elsewhere.
How did attention affect awareness in Debner & Jacoby’s (1994) divided attention experiment?
Full attention: Focus on the word → conscious control over responses.
Divided attention: Perform a digit sum task first → reduced awareness, more priming.
Conclusion: Dividing attention reduces conscious control and increases unconscious influence.
