Individual differences in prioritization for consciousness and the conscious detection of changes.
Gal R. Chen, Yuval Harris, Ran R. Hassin
Consciousness and Cognition March 1, 2025 DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2025.103831 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Experimental study Preregistered Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Sample size | 196 |
| Population | Adult human participants |
| Keywords | Change blindness Consciousness Individual differences Vision |
| Key findings | Prioritization speed to awareness correlates with change blindness performance, and this relationship is not accounted for by other perceptual-decision tasks. |
Abstract
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 this trait to perceptual conscious experiences. In two experiments we demonstrate that the speed of prioritization to awareness is correlated with the ability to notice changes in a change blindness paradigm. The first experiment (N = 97) found a correlation between prioritization speed and multiple parameters of change blindness performance. The second, preregistered, replication experiment (N = 99), further demonstrated that variability in other perceptual-decision making tasks cannot account for this correlation. The results of both experiments suggest that prioritization speed is tightly related with conscious experiences in other situations.