Program
Vincent de Gardelle (LSCP) & Jérôme Sackur (LSCP),
'Consciousness Categorizes: Insights from Experimental Psychology'
We will present two novel experimental paradigms in the visual domain, and some behavioural results that emphasize the link between consciousness and categorization.
1) In a first paradigm, we asked participants to perform a familiarity judgement on a face picture (the target) that was preceded by another face picture (the prime). The prime picture was created by morphing between the target face and a different face. We analyzed reaction times as a function of prime-target distance on the "morphing continuum". When participants were unaware of the prime, priming effects reflected linearly the distance between the prime and the target. In stark contrast, when the prime was perceived consciously, non-linear and categorical effects appeared.
2) In a second paradigm, we hypothesize that when we become conscious of a stimulus, we achieve a better discriminability of the stimulus, but we are also subject to a greater bias. We capitalize on the pre-existence of categories in visual perception of orientations, so as to show that below the threshold of consciousness perception is noisy but faithfull, whereas beyond the same threshold perception is attracted towards conscious categories.
Overall we present a framework in which consciousness is instrumental for categorization.