Perceptual Awareness Occurs Along a Graded Continuum: No Evidence of All-or-None Failures in Continuous Reproduction Tasks

Does sensory information reach conscious awareness in a discrete, all-or-nothing manner or a gradual, continuous manner? To answer this question, we examined behavioral performance across four different paradigms that manipulate visual awareness: the attentional blink, backward masking, the Sperling iconic memory paradigm, and retro-cuing. We then asked how well we could account for participants' (N = 112 adults) behavior using a signal detection framework that factors in psychophysical scaling to model participants' responses along a single continuum. We found that this model easily accounted for the data from each of these diverse paradigms. Moreover, we reanalyzed the data from prior studies that had posited a discrete view of perceptual awareness and found that our continuous signal detection model outperformed the models that had been used to support an all-or-nothing view of consciousness. This set of data is consistent with the idea that conscious awareness occurs along a graded continuum.

Automated summary

In this study, the researchers investigated different paradigms of visual awareness to determine whether conscious awareness occurs in a discrete or gradual manner. They found that a continuous signal detection model could account for the data from all the paradigms, surpassing the models supporting a discrete view of consciousness. These findings suggest that conscious awareness operates along a graded continuum.