PubMed · 16297833
The source did not provide an abstract. Follow the original record for more information.
Explore connections, maps & timelines
Steven Laureys, Sonia Piret, Didier Ledoux. 2005. Quantifying consciousness.. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1474-4422(05)70230-1
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.
KEEP EXPLORING
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
In this "Reply" paper, the arguments and experimental findings by Pockett, Pollen, and Haggard et al. are analyzed. It had been shown () that a 0.5s duration of repetitive activations of sensory cortex is required to produce a threshold of sensation. The view that this is due to a facilitatory buildup in excitatory state to finally elicit neuronal firing is shown to be incompatible with several lines of evidence. Objections to the phenomenon of subjective referral backwards in time (for the delayed sensation) are also untenable. report that a self-initiated act can, under hypnotic suggestion, appear to the subject to be "involuntary." The act under hypnosis is better viewed as one initiated unconsciously, not as an act of conscious will.
Whether masked words can be processed at a semantic level remains a controversial issue in cognitive psychology. Although recent behavioral studies have demonstrated masked semantic priming for number words, attempts to generalize this finding to other categories of words have failed. Here, as an alternative to subliminal priming, we introduce a sensitive behavioral method to detect nonconscious semantic processing of words. The logic of this method consists of presenting words close to the threshold for conscious perception and examining whether their semantic content modulates performance in objective and subjective tasks. Our results disclose two independent sources of modulation of the threshold for access to consciousness. First, prior conscious perception of words increases the detection rate of the same words when they are subsequently presented with stronger masking. Second, the threshold for conscious access is lower for emotional words than for neutral ones, even for words that have not been previously consciously perceived, thus implying that written words can receive nonconscious semantic processing.