In consciousness research, subjective measures (reports of sensory experience) and objective measures (performance on detection or discrimination tasks) are both used to assess visual awareness. While subjective measures sometimes lag behind objective ones, many studies show they converge. Five aspects relevant to achieving convergence are identified, and future work should test the boundary conditions under which convergence or divergence occurs.
Objective performance measures and subjective ratings of visual awareness yield similar thresholds for detecting and discriminating visual stimuli, supporting the validity of both approaches. In a temporal two-alternative forced choice task, participants' accuracy in detecting stimulus presence and discriminating letter case was compared with their subjective ratings using the Perceptual Awareness Scale (PAS) at high and low contrast. Thresholds for objective and subjective measures showed a comparable pattern across tasks and contrast levels, suggesting that both methods provide converging information about the feature-content of a percept and are likely veridical measures of awareness.