Individual differences in prioritization for consciousness and the conscious detection of changes.

People differ reliably in how quickly non-conscious visual stimuli enter awareness, a trait linked to later cognitive and emotional processes. Two experiments tested whether this prioritization speed relates to noticing changes in a change blindness task. In the first experiment (97 participants), faster prioritization correlated with better change detection across multiple measures. A preregistered replication (99 participants) confirmed this correlation and showed it was not explained by variability in other perceptual-decision tasks. The findings suggest that the speed of becoming aware of stimuli is tightly connected to conscious experiences in other situations.

Study at a glance

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.