Criterion placement threatens the construct validity of neural measures of consciousness.
Johannes Jacobus Fahrenfort, Philippa A. Johnson, Niels A. Kloosterman, Timo Stein, Simon van Gaal
Elife May 28, 2025 DOI: 10.7554/elife.102335 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Simulation and experimental study with electroencephalography Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Population | Human observers (implied from EEG studies) |
| Topics | Philosophy of mind |
| Keywords | Criterion Human Signal detection theory Subjective measures Cognitive bias Neuroscience methodology Subjective perception Decision making |
| Citations | 10 |
| Key findings | Conservative criterion placement inflates neural effect sizes for both conscious and unconscious processing, while liberal criterion placement reduces them, and the PAS does not guard against these confounds. |
Abstract
How consciousness arises from brain activity has been a topic of intense scientific research for decades. But how does one identify the neural basis of something that is intrinsically personal and subjective? A hallmark approach has been to ask human observers to judge stimuli as 'seen' (conscious) and 'unseen' (unconscious) and use post hoc sorting of neural measurements based these judgments. Unfortunately, cognitive and response biases are known to strongly affect how observers place their criterion for judging stimuli as 'seen' versus 'unseen', thereby confounding neural measures of consciousness. Surprisingly however, the effect of conservative and liberal criterion placement on neural measures of unconscious and conscious processing has never been explicitly investigated. Here, we use simulations and electrophysiological brain measurements to show that conservative criterion placement has an unintuitive consequence: rather than selectively providing a cautious estimate of conscious processing, it inflates effect sizes in neural measures of both conscious and unconscious processing, while liberal criterion placement does the reverse. After showing this in simulation, we performed decoding analyses on two electroencephalography studies that employ common subjective indicators of conscious awareness, in which we experimentally manipulated the response criterion. The results confirm that the predicted confounding effects of criterion placement on neural measures of unconscious and conscious processing occur in empirical data, while further showing that the most widely used subjective scale, the Perceptual Awareness Scale (PAS), does not guard against criterion confounds. Follow-up simulations explicate how the experimental context determines whether the relative confounding effect of criterion placement is larger in neural measures of either conscious or unconscious processing. We conclude that criterion placement threatens the construct validity of neural measures of conscious and unconscious processing.
Comparable studies
Other experimental studies on philosophy of mind, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| A Deep-Dream Virtual Reality Platform for Studying Altered Perceptual Phenomenology | 2017 | Experimental study | |
| New World Tryptamine Hallucinogens and the Neuroscience of Ayahuasca. | 2018 | Review with original neuroimaging and neurophysiological data | |
| Differential contributions of serotonergic and dopaminergic functional connectivity to the phenomenology of LSD Healthy adults | 2022 | Secondary analysis of experimental data | n = 15 |
| TMS-EEG and resting-state EEG applied to altered states of consciousness: oscillations, complexity, and phenomenology. | 2023 | Experimental study | |
| Training novice practitioners to reliably report their meditation experience using shared phenomenological dimensions. Novice meditation practitioners | 2019 | Neurophenomenological experiment |
Citations in the library
Cited by 6
- Human consciousness and cognition go hand in hand, but require different types of explanations Aperture Neuro March 18, 2026
- Neural correlates of perceptual consciousness from within: a narrative review of human intracranial research Elife January 13, 2026
- Did you see it? Elife May 28, 2025
- The act of detecting a stimulus contaminates measures of conscious experience with decision biases. Nature Communications May 8, 2026
- Updated Expectations are Needed for Masked Priming Experiments: Commentary on Tsikandilakis et al. (2025). Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science March 25, 2026
and 1 more in the library
Cites 20
- Opposing effects of attention and consciousness on afterimages Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences April 27, 2010
- Perceptual integration without conscious access. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences April 4, 2017
- An academic survey on theoretical foundations, common assumptions and the current state of consciousness science Neuroscience of Consciousness 2022
- Informative neural representations of unseen contents during higher-order processing in human brains and deep artificial networks. Nature Human Behaviour May 2022
- The Perceptual Awareness Scale-recent controversies and debates. Neuroscience of Consciousness December 15, 2021
and 15 more in the library