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Betting the house on consciousness

Nature Neuroscience volume 10, pages 140–141 (2007)Cite this article

Studying consciousness is difficult because asking subjects to report their awareness of a stimulus perturbs that awareness. A new paper shows that asking subjects to wager on whether their response is correct can solve this problem.

Much of what we do seems to happen outside of our awareness. Many, if not most, of our behaviors seem resistant to conscious introspection, from the simple (adjusting our body posture) to the complex (deciding whether to marry someone). However, rigorously establishing the notion that much of our mental life is unconscious—popularized by the neuroscientist-turned-psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud—is not easy. Despite the seemingly straightforward nature of questions such as “Did you see the light?” asked in routine psychology experiments, more than a hundred years of research have demonstrated how difficult these questions are to answer in a satisfactory manner. The key problem is to define awareness so that it can be measured independent of internal settings that vary from subject to subject (such as a threshold above which an event registers in awareness) while still capturing its subjective character1,2. Another major issue is that attending to an initially nonperceived stimulus attribute to assess whether one is aware of it may cause it, over time, to rise to the level of awareness. There is thus a pressing need for means to better assess awareness.

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Figure 1: A conventional psychometric curve (blue), linking some stimulus parameter in a binary task to performance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Biology and Division of Engineering and Applied Science,

    Christof Koch & Kerstin Preuschoff

  2. Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, 216-76, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, 91125, California, USA

    Christof Koch & Kerstin Preuschoff

Authors
  1. Christof Koch
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  2. Kerstin Preuschoff
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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Koch, C., Preuschoff, K. Betting the house on consciousness. Nat Neurosci 10, 140–141 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn0207-140

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