Conscious experiences appear to play a central role in human behavior, yet most neural processing occurs outside of consciousness. Understanding how the mind prioritizes information for consciousness is, therefore, crucial for theories of cognition. Prior research has largely focused on vision, but generalization is tenuous given the vastly different characteristics of the senses—particularly...
Abundant evidence shows that when listening to speech or reading text, we continuously make predictions about upcoming words. Does this process stop when our mind wanders away and subjective experience becomes decoupled from the content of the speech? Conversely, is word prediction sufficient for conscious experience, or can these processes dissociate? Participants (N = 25) listened to...
A recent discovery documented robust and reliable individual differences in how quickly people become aware of non-conscious visual stimuli (Sklar, Goldstein, et al., 2021). Given the seemingly large role that conscious experiences play in our lives, this trait is likely to be associated with later cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes. Here we examine the possible implications of...