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Learning Rapidly about the Relevance of Visual Cues Requires Conscious Awareness

Citation: Travers, Eoin and Frith, Chris and Shea, Nicholas (2018) Learning Rapidly about the Relevance of Visual Cues Requires Conscious Awareness. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology . ISSN 1747-0226 (In Press)

Learning Rapidly about the Relevance of Visual Cues Requires Conscious Awareness.pdf

Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0

Humans have been shown capable of performing many cognitive tasks using information of which they are not consciously aware. This raises questions about what role consciousness actually plays in cognition. Here, we explored whether participants can learn cue-target contingencies in an attentional learning task when the cues were presented below the level of conscious awareness, and how this differs from learning about conscious cues. Participants’ manual (Experiment 1) and saccadic (Experiment 2) response speeds were influenced by both conscious and unconscious cues. However, participants were only able to adapt to reversals of the cue-target contingencies (Experiment 1) or changes in the reliability of the cues (Experiment 2) when consciously aware of the cues. Therefore, although visual cues can be processed unconsciously, learning about cues over a few trials requires conscious awareness of them. Finally, we discuss implications for cognitive theories of consciousness.

Creators: Travers, Eoin (0000-0001-7623-5533) and Frith, Chris (0000-0002-8665-0690) and Shea, Nicholas (0000-0002-2032-5705) and
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2017.1373834
Official URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1080/17470218....
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Subjects: Philosophy
Keywords: Consciousness, Learning: Attention: Masked priming: Psychology
Divisions: Institute of Philosophy
Dates:
  • 19 June 2017 (accepted)
  • 1 January 2018 (published)

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