Symposium 3 Talk 3: Sligte

Thursday, July 5 2012 14:00-16:00 @ Dome Theatre

Symposium 3: "Perceptual consciousness and cognitive access"
Talk 3: "Making perceptual consciousness accessible"

Ilja Gabriël Sligte (Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

SUMMARY

In recent years, we have published several papers showing the existence of a high-capacity (up to 15 objects) and long-lived (up to 4s) form of sensory memory that can be clearly dissociated from pure iconic memory (Sligte, Scholte, Lamme, 2008) and from working memory (Sligte, Wokke, Tesselaar, Scholte, & Lamme, 2010; Vandenbroucke, Sligte, & Lamme, 2011). However, all these results were based on partial-report experiments where subjects had to choose between change and no-change responses. This fact has triggered the criticism that subjects were just guessing (Phillips, 2011) on the basis of unconscious representations, as in blindsight. To explore this alternative explanation of our findings, we tested how subjects performed on a partial-report task with continuous response options (see Zhang & Luck, 2008; Bays & Husain, 2008 for examples of the task; we added retro-cues to this paradigm similar to Sligte, Scholte, & Lamme, 2008). We observed that subjects could report 7 objects (out of 10) with high precision on pure iconic memory conditions, about 6 on retro-cue (long-lasting and fragile form of iconic memory) conditions, and only 4 on postcue, working memory conditions. This suggests that all our previous studies validly make perceptual consciousness available for cognitive access.