Did I read or did I name? Diminished awareness of processes yielding identical 'outputs'

Abstract

It has been proposed that incompatible intentions (e.g., to inhale and not inhale while holding one's breath while underwater) are an essential ingredient of conscious conflict. Laboratory tasks such as the Stroop color naming task can instantiate conscious conflict innocuously. However, little research has explored what occurs subjectively at the other end of conflict, when intentions are harmonious. The hypothesis of synchrony blindness proposes that, during harmonious processing, not only may one not experience any conflict, but one may also be unaware that more than one process yielded the same intention/action plan. Accordingly, in the Stroop task, participants reported less of an urge to err (by reading) when words were presented in the congruent condition (e.g., RED presented in red) than when the very same words were presented in standard font color, suggesting that awareness of word-reading was diminished experimentally. The implications of this finding for theories about consciousness are discussed.