The act of detecting a stimulus contaminates measures of conscious experience with decision biases.
Nature Communications May 8, 2026 Nicolás Sánchez-Fuenzalida, Chris Jungerius, Stephen M Fleming et al.
A central challenge in consciousness research is determining whether observers have a conscious experience of a stimulus. However, present/absent detection judgments are often biased by contextual factors, making it difficult to isolate conscious perception from non-perceptual influences. Traditional psychophysical methods struggle to disentangle these components. To address this, we conducted...