Visual awareness judgments are sensitive to accuracy feedback in stimulus discrimination tasks

Abstract

In this study we tested the hypothesis that perceptual awareness judgments are sensitive to accuracy feedback about the previous action. We used a perceptual discrimination task in which participants reported their stimulus awareness. We created two conditions: No-feedback and Feedback (discrimination accuracy feedback was provided at the end of each trial). The results showed that visual awareness judgments are related to the accuracy of current and previous responses. Participants reported lower stimulus awareness for incorrectly versus correctly discriminated stimuli in both conditions; they also reported lower stimulus awareness in trials preceded by incorrect discrimination responses, compared to trials preceded by correct discrimination responses. This difference was significantly stronger in the Feedback condition, in which we also observed post-error slowing for PAS ratings. We discuss the relation between visual awareness and the effects of performance monitoring and interpret the results in the context of current theories of consciousness.

Keywords: Error detection; Feedback; PAS; Performance monitoring; Visual awareness.