Direct assessment of qualia in a blindsight participant.
Experimenters generally infer whether participants have visual experiences based on metacognitive responses. We showed a well-studied blindsight participant, GY, several definitions of the term "qualia" and then questioned him about whether he felt or he experienced qualia in his normal and blind fields. We found, contrary to others who have used different methods for measuring qualia, that GY does not have qualia for stationary stimuli in his blind field. This novel method for directly assessing qualia embraces the idea that experiences should be related by the experiencer, not the experimenter.
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3UD, United Kingdom. nav.persaud@utoronto.ca
Navindra
N
Persaud
Hakwan
H
Lau
D003071:Cognition; D006801:Humans; D011601:Psychophysics; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological; D014794:Visual Fields; D014796:Visual Perception