title: Being confident without seeing: what subjective measures of visual consciousness are about.
abstract: Can observers be confident about the accuracy of a discrimination response without a visual experience of the stimulus? In a series of five experiments, observers performed a masked orientation discrimination task, a masked shape discrimination task, or a random-dot motion discrimination task, followed by two subjective ratings after each trial, in which participants reported either their visual experience of the stimulus or their confidence in being correct. We observed that the threshold for ratings of the perception of the stimulus was above the threshold for ratings of a decision, that decision ratings outperformed stimulus ratings in predicting trial accuracy, and that different decision-related scales were more strongly associated with other decision-related scales than with ratings of stimulus clarity. We propose a taxonomy of subjective measures of consciousness that differentiates between subjective measures relating to the percept of the stimulus and measures relating to a discrimination decision and discuss the relation to type II blindsight.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Leopoldstrasse 13, 80802, Munich, Germany, mzehetleitner@psy.lmu.de.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Zehetleitner
authors.forename: Manuel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rausch
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001766:Blindness / Q000503:physiopathology*; D003243:Consciousness / Q000502:physiology*; D003657:Decision Making / Q000502:physiology; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D016014:Linear Models; D008297:Male; D008960:Models, Psychological; D009949:Orientation / Q000502:physiology; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology*; D011594:Psychometrics / Q000379:methods; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological / Q000502:physiology; D014795:Visual Pathways / Q000502:physiology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult