We briefly presented either the letter ‘b’ or the letter ‘h’ to participants who were instructed to respond by saying the letter that was not shown. This binary version of the exclusion task avoids problems with assessing baseline completion rates. When the letters were shown for 5–10 ms participants erroneously responded with the shown letter at a rate greater than chance. They were capable of following the instructions when the letter was shown for longer . Given the chance to wager (...) low or high on their choices after short duration stimuli, participants declined to wager high even when they were correct. Taken together these results suggest that the briefly presented stimuli were processed subconsciously. (shrink)

Experimenters generally infer whether participants have visual experiences based on metacognitive responses. We showed a well-studied blindsight participant, GY, several definitions of the term “qualia” and then questioned him about whether he felt or he experienced qualia in his normal and blind fields. We found, contrary to others who have used different methods for measuring qualia, that GY does not have qualia for stationary stimuli in his blind field. This novel method for directly assessing qualia embraces the idea that experiences (...) should be related by the experiencer, not the experimenter. (shrink)

We explored whether information processed subconsciously in blindsight is qualitatively different from normal conscious processing. On each trial the blindsight patient GY was presented with a square-wave grating either in an upper or lower quadrant of his visual field and was asked to report the opposite of its location . We found that while GY was able to follow these exclusion instructions in his normal field, he tended to erroneously respond with the real location when the grating appeared in his (...) blind field. Remarkably, his error rate actually increased with increasing grating contrast in his blind field. The interpretation of these results does not rely on subjective reports and thus cannot be criticized on the grounds that subjective reports are unreliable. We conclude that blindsight is unlike normal conscious vision. (shrink)

Background Medical schools are grappling with how best to manage industry involvement in medical education.Objective To describe a case study of industry-supported undergraduate medical education related to opioid analgesics.Method Institutional case study.Results As part of their regular curriculum, Canadian medical students attended pain pharmacotherapy lectures that contained questionable content about the use of opioids for pain management. The lectures were supported by pharmaceutical companies that market opioid analgesics in Canada and the guest lecturer was a member of speakers bureaus of (...) the same companies. These conflicts of interests were not fully disclosed. A reference book that reinforced some of the information in the lectures and that was paid for by a sponsoring company was made available to students. This is the first report of an association between industry sponsorship and the dissemination of potentially dangerous information to medical students.Conclusions This case demonstrates the need for better strategies for preventing, identifying and dealing with problematic interactions between the pharmaceutical industry and undergraduate medical education. These might include the avoidance of unnecessary conflicts of interest, more disclosure of conflicts, an open process for dealing with recognised problems and internationally harmonised conflict of interest policies. (shrink)

Descriptive Experience Sampling is a clever method for determining the form of everyday thoughts. Results using this method show that people report that some of their thoughts are unsymbolic. Here I ask three questions: Does this merely show that people know what they are thinking about but not what they are thinking? Why do people have difficulty determining the form of their thoughts? How does the act of reporting the form of thoughts affect the recall of those thoughts?

The binary exclusion task involves “subtle priming effects” and a measure of awareness that is reliable, relevant, immediate, and sensitive. This task, which meets the criteria outlined in the target article, has been used to demonstrate subconscious processing.

The fact that early visual processing has a larger capacity than later visual processing can be explained without positing distinct systems for phenomenology and cognitive accessibility. While phenomenology may overflow forced-choice reports, the later can also overestimate the former, as in the case of blindsight. Metacognitive measures of awareness offer a way to address the of consciousness research.