Thanks to the wealth of studies on mind-wandering, the stream of thought has now become, again, the focus of mainstream investigations in cognitive psychology. Yet, how one should describe and measure the stream of thought is still very much left undecided. Here, we approach the problem through the notion of mental states. Based on conceptual analysis and previous empirical data, we identify...
To test the specific effects of hypnosis on the attentional components of visual awareness, we developed a posthypnotic suggestion for peripheral visual inattention inspired on the "tunnel vision" symptom of the Balint Syndrome. We constructed a dual-target visibility and discrimination paradigm, in which single-digit numerical targets were placed both on the hypnotically affected peripheral...
The literature in metacognition has argued for many years that introspective access to our own mental content is restricted to the cognitive states associated with the response to a task, such as the level of confidence in a decision or the estimation of the response time; however, the cognitive processes that underlie such states were deemed inaccessible to participants' consciousness. Here,...
Current theories of consciousness posit a dissociation between 'phenomenal' consciousness (rich) and 'access' consciousness (limited). Here, we argue that the empirical evidence for phenomenal consciousness without access is equivocal, resulting either from a confusion between phenomenal and unconscious contents, or from an impression of phenomenally rich experiences arising from illusory...
Psychologists often dismiss introspection as an inappropriate measure, yet subjects readily volunteer detailed descriptions of the time and effort that they spent on a task. Are such reports really so inaccurate? We asked subjects to perform a psychological refractory period experiment followed by extensive quantified introspection. On each trial, just after their objective responses, subjects...
We often feel that our perceptual experience is richer than what we can express. For instance, when flashed with a large set of letters, we feel that we can see them all, while we can report only a few. However, the nature of this subjective impression remains highly debated: while many favour a dissociation between two forms of consciousness (access vs. phenomenal consciousness), others...