Consciousness and Cognition 18 (2009) 551560

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Consciousness and Cognition

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Signal detection theory, the exclusion failure paradigm and weak consciousnessEvidence for the access/phenomenal distinction?
Elizabeth Irvine
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, Dugald Stewart Building, 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh, Midlothian EH8 9AD, UK

a r t i c l e

i n f o

a b s t r a c t
Block [Block, N. (2005). Two neural correlates of consciousness. Trends in Cognitive Science, 9, 4652] and Snodgrass (2006) claim that a signal detection theory (SDT) analysis of qualitative difference paradigms, in particular the exclusion failure paradigm, reveals cases of phenomenal consciousness without access consciousness. This claim is unwarranted on several grounds. First, partial cognitive access rather than a total lack of cognitive access can account for exclusion failure results. Second, Snodgrasss Objective Threshold/Strategic (OT/S) model of perception relies on a problematic enable approach to perception that denies the possibility of intentional control of unconscious perception and any effect of following different task instructions on the presence/absence of phenomenal consciousness. Many of Blocks purported examples of phenomenal consciousness without cognitive access also rely on this problematic approach. Third, qualitative difference paradigms may index only a subset of access consciousness. Thus, qualitative difference paradigms like exclusion failure cannot be used to isolate phenomenal consciousness, any attempt to do so still faces serious methodological problems. 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Article history: Received 4 March 2008 Available online 23 December 2008

Keywords: Signal detection theory Access consciousness Phenomenal consciousness Reexive consciousness Exclusion failure paradigm

1. Introduction Blocks distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness is meant to highlight the differences between the functional and the experiential aspects of consciousness. Block argues that many scientists who claim to research consciousness only succeed in describing aspects of access consciousness, not phenomenal consciousness, and thereby miss out an important part of human experience. Access consciousness is loosely dened as involving whatever information is in the global workspace or on-line processing. Phenomenal consciousness is dened as the what-is-it-like-ness of an experience. These loose denitions make it difcult to identify cases of pure access or pure phenomenal consciousness, leading to the challenge of how to operationalise these two concepts. Ned Block (2005) and Michael Snodgrass (Snodgrass, Bernat, & Shevrin, 2004; Snodgrass & Shevrin, 2006) claim that a signal detection theory (SDT) approach to perception can be used to identify and isolate phenomenal consciousness. They further claim that the exclusion failure paradigm provides experimental evidence for the existence of phenomenal consciousness without access consciousness. Under their interpretation, the threshold at which subjects fail to report stimuli, the subjective threshold, is the point below which experiences can be phenomenally conscious but not (usually) cognitively accessed. After a brief description of access and phenomenal consciousness, signal detection theory (SDT) and the exclusion failure paradigm, I will explain how Snodgrass and Block have used SDT to differentiate access and phenomenal consciousness. I will then argue that Snodgrass and Block have not provided an example of isolated phenomenal consciousness, and that doing so remains a very difcult task. The rst argument against Snodgrass and Blocks claims concerns an alternative explanation of
E-mail address: elizabethirv@gmail.com 1053-8100/$ - see front matter 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2008.11.002

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Fig. 1. From Snodgrass (2002, pg. 550). Reproduced with permission from Elsevier.

exclusion failure by Fisk and Haase (2006) which suggests that partial cognitive access can account for the experimental results rather than a complete lack of cognitive access. The second set of problems concerns Snodgrass and Blocks reliance on an enable, rather than an endow, approach to perception. Although Snodgrass and Blocks models of perception differ, the problems with this approach apply to both of their interpretations of the exclusion failure paradigm, and to Snodgrasss Objective Threshold/Strategic (OT/S) model of perception in general. The nal argument points to the problem in categorizing the kind of consciousness that the exclusion failure paradigm assesses. I argue that the complexity of the task suggests that it indexes only a part of what is cognitively accessed by the subject. Therefore, the paradigm cannot be used to isolate phenomenal consciousness, and the general method of using performance thresholds dened in SDT as thresholds of access and phenomenal consciousness is a questionable one. 2. Access and phenomenal consciousness First of all, it is important to describe access and phenomenal consciousness as originally conceived by Block (see e.g. Block, 1990). Block drew the distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness in order to argue against a functionalist theory of consciousness. Access consciousness is the sort of consciousness that functionalism can describe while phenomenal consciousness is the sort that it leaves out. Access consciousness concerns consumer systems such as systems of memory, perceptual categorization, reasoning, planning, evaluation of alternatives, decision-making, voluntary direction of attention, and more generally, rational control of action (Block, 2005, p. 48). Although reportability is normally taken to be the measure of access consciousness, it is possible to have access consciousness with a lack of report, such as in pre-verbal infants, some animals, and people suffering from paralysis.1 Following the terminology of the global workspace theory (Dehaene & Changeux, 2004; Dehaene & Naccache, 2001), Block identies access consciousness with whatever information is in the global workspace, which is commonly equated with working memory.2 Although a functionalist theory of consciousness can investigate and describe the activities carried out in the global workspace, it misses out something important. Functionalism does not seem to capture what it is like to be conscious. The whatit-is-like-ness of consciousness is what Block calls phenomenal consciousness, or more recently, phenomenology (Block, 2007). Along with traditional richness arguments, Block claims that we are conscious of more information than we can report or identify at any one time, so phenomenal consciousness covers more information than is available in the global workspace. According to Block, phenomenal consciousness overows cognitive accessibility (Block, 2007, p. 481). Phenomenal consciousness is a slippery concept since it cannot be identied with a report, and raises the question if and how phenomenal consciousness can be identied experimentally. However, Block and Snodgrass claim to be able to identify it using response criterions dened in SDT, as applied to the exclusion failure paradigm. 3. Signal detection theory (SDT) SDT is a model of how systems detect signals amongst noise, and since it was shown to apply to the human perceptual system (Green & Swets, 1966), it has been used to investigate unconscious perception. Fig. 1 shows how a word detection task can be modeled. The basic idea is that the more word-like a stimulus is, the easier it is to detect. In the middle of the word-likeness scale, some words can look like noise, and some noise can look like words, leading to possible errors in word detection. Since the noise (on the left) and signal plus noise (on the right) distributions overlap, the subject must decide what level of word-likeness they will count as a positive detection. If this level is too high, they will fail to detect some words (false negatives), and if the level is too low, they will falsely identify noise as words (false positives). The level at which subjects start to make positive detections is the criterion level c, and varies according to many variables such as task type, type and length of training,

1 People with locked-in syndrome or severe paralysis may be said to be capable of access consciousness if brain imaging shows activation in areas thought to be necessary to completing a task (e.g. they are capable of at least imagining performing an intentional action upon request). 2 On the relation between working memory and access consciousness see Block (2007, especially pp. 487496), and Shanahan and Baars (2007).

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50 ms Target word reason 250 ms

word stem rea

Inclusion task complete stem to form target (priming)

Exclusion task Inclusion task word stem rea

Half of subjects given motivation via money for good performance

Exclusion task complete stem to form word that is not the target, e.g. reader

Fig. 2. Exclusion failure Paradigm.

and motivation (Green & Swets, 1966). The criterion level therefore tracks the effects of non-perceptual factors on the responses of the subject. The use of SDT in psychophysics gave researchers a method of nding an invariable measure of a subjects ability to do a task. Previously, researchers had relied on subjective measures of perception that do not take into account the response criterion of the subject. The subjective threshold is the point at which subjects no longer freely report the presence of a stimulus (or identity, depending on the task), and this point can be taken to be the threshold for conscious perception. However, since this threshold is liable to change with the criterion level, it does not accurately reect the subjects underlying ability to discriminate or identify stimuli. SDT analysis provides an objective measure of a subjects sensitivity to stimuli, and can be used to nd minimum conditions (e.g. stimulus durations) for above chance task performance.3 The objective detection threshold (ODT), marks where a subject is no longer able to detect a stimulus among noise (yes/no forced choice task), and the objective identication threshold (OIT) marks where a subject is no longer able to identify stimuli out of several possible choices, (n-alternative forced choice task). The detection threshold is typically lower than the identication threshold since less information is needed to complete this task. An example of how SDT has been applied to discussions of conscious and unconscious perception is the case of perceptual defense (for original papers on perceptual defense, see e.g. Bruner & Postman,1947a, 1947b, 1949). Here, two sets of words are ashed at subjects, one set is neutral (e.g. shot) and one might be swear words (e.g. shit) or sexually loaded words. Despite both sets of words being shown in equivalent conditions, subjects are consistently better at freely reporting (i.e. reading back) the neutral words than the swear words. Since the threshold for freely reporting neutral words is higher than that for reporting swear words, it was thought that the swear words were perceived unconsciously and then repressed by some defense mechanism. However, early SDT theorists argued that both sets of words are processed to an equally high level, but that subjects do not like reporting swear words, i.e. they have a higher criterion level for reporting shit than for shot (Blackwell, 1952; Eriksen, 1960; Goldiamond, 1958). This is because subjects might not expect swear words to be ashed at them by experimenters, they might feel uncomfortable in acknowledging or reporting the words, and they will probably be more worried about false positives (reporting the presence of a stimulus when it is not there) for swear words than for neutral words. Therefore, subjects want to be very condent that they see shit before they report it, but will report lower condence perceptions of shot. Perceptual defense illustrates how subjective reports can be very unreliable measures of what a subject is experiencing, and how useful objective measures are in giving a measure of task performance that discounts response bias. SDT in itself is neutral about the relationship between subjective and objective measures and consciousness. However, it provides a useful framework to use in a scientic description of conscious and unconscious perception, and response thresholds dened by SDT suggest themselves to be thresholds of consciousness. Thus Snodgrass and Shevrin have claimed that: . . .objective threshold methods index phenomenally unconscious perception, whereas subjective threshold methods index phenomenally conscious but reectively unconscious perception (Snodgrass & Shevrin, 2006, p. 74). They argue that above the objective identication threshold (OIT) but below the subjective threshold, subjects are weakly conscious of stimuli. That is, in this intermediate area, subjects are phenomenally conscious of stimuli but do not (usually) have any cognitive access to this information. Although Block does not support Snodgrasss model of conscious/unconscious perception in full, he does assert that in some cases, such as the exclusion failure paradigm, SDT analysis suggests that there are cases of phenomenal consciousness without cognitive access. The exclusion failure paradigm and Block and Snodgrasss interpretation of it is discussed below.

The subjective/objective distinction originates from Cheesman and Merikles work on unconscious perception (see Cheesman & Merikle, 1984).

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Table 1 Mean proportion of stem words completed to form target in the exclusion failure paradigm. 0 ms presentation duration Inclusion task Control Motivated Exclusion task Control Motivated .20 .03* .25 .04 .22 .03 .23 .03 50 ms .39 .06 .42 .06 .26 .04 .18 .04 250 ms .97 .02 .99 .01 .08 .03 .02 .01

Adapted from Table 1 in Visser and Merikle (1999, p. 100). Used with permission from the University of Illinois Press. * .95% condence interval.

4. The exclusion failure paradigm The exclusion failure paradigm is summarized in Fig. 2. Subjects are shown a target word (e.g. reason) for either 50 ms or 250 ms. The 250 ms duration is long enough for subjects to freely report the stimulus, but at 50 ms duration subjects do not report seeing the stimulus. A word stem rea is then shown, and the subjects asked to perform either an inclusion or an exclusion task. The inclusion task is to complete the word stem to form the target word, reason. This is an easy task to complete, even at 50 ms, as it is a case of standard priming. The exclusion task is to complete the word stem to form a word that is not the targetto exclude the target to form for example reader. This task is fairly hard even at 250 ms as it requires concentration to overcome the priming effects. In order to investigate the effects of motivation on this task, Visser and Merikle (1999) also offered half their subjects money as a reward for good task performance. The results are shown below in Table 1. The qualitative difference in performance for the control subjects doing the exclusion task is fairly clear. For a stimulus duration of 50 ms subjects perform close to baseline levels, but improve greatly for the 250 ms stimuli. This difference in responses, successful exclusion at 250 ms and exclusion failure at 50 ms, was used by Visser and Merikle to argue that the 250 ms stimuli are consciously perceived but the 50 ms stimuli are not, since successful exclusion was assumed to depend on the stimuli being conscious. For the payoff bonus group who received money for successfully completing a task, Visser and Merikle found evidence that motivation can in fact signicantly improve exclusion task performance at the 50 ms level. This was a very surprising result for Visser and Merikle, since perceptual processing of the 50 ms stimuli was supposed to be unconscious, automatic, and impervious to top-down effects such as increased motivation. This leads to an obvious problem for them in describing a model to account for their results. I will contrast Visser and Merikles model with that of Block and Snodgrasss interpretation of their results, which I argue rests on questionable assumptions. 5. Enable or endow? exclusion failure The two explanations of the improvement seen in exclusion task with motivation follow the basic enable and endow accounts of perception.4 Visser and Merikles account can be described as an endow account in which the only stimuli that we are conscious of are those we are currently making use of, reporting, reasoning with and so forth. Any stimuli that are not presented above the subjective threshold and are not present in the global workspace are completely unconscious. Snodgrass and Block favor an enable account (though Block does not follow this account in all cases) in which we are able to have experiences of stimuli even though we may not be making use of them in the global workspace. As Snodgrass and Shevrin note: It is unclear whether reective processes simply enable the strategic use of (already) phenomenally conscious stimuli, as in our proposal, or whether reective processes actually endow subjective threshold stimuli with phenomenal awareness (Snodgrass & Shevrin, 2006, pg. 76, original italics). According to Snodgrass and Block, stimuli presented below the subjective threshold can sometimes be consciously experienced, and reasoning about these stimuli simply enables a higher order consciousness of the already conscious stimuli. In line with endow approaches, Visser and Merikle argue that information at the 50 ms stimulus level is capable of being both consciously (intentionally) and unconsciously (automatically) processed. In normal conditions, the unconscious processes win out, which results in predictable and automatic effects such as priming. With increased motivation and therefore increased attention directed to the task, conscious intentional control can override the priming effects that are normally automatic. In this paper, Visser and Merikle do not provide a model of the effects of attention, but it may be said to follow something like Dehaene and Changeux (2004), Dehaene, Changeux, Naccache, Sackur, and Sergent (2006) model of preconscious stimuli, in which attention can make low level stimuli available to the global workspace. With increased attention, previously unused and therefore unconscious information can be endowed with consciousness. Visser and Merikles model does not contain a level of unaccessed awareness, so all perception below the subjective threshold is completely unconscious.

For more on the original distinction between enable and endow accounts, see Weiskrantz (1998).

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Although Snodgrass and Block differ in their precise accounts of phenomenal consciousness without cognitive access, they both follow an enable account of the exclusion failure paradigm. Unlike Visser and Merickle they argue that the qualitative difference in behavior seen in the experiment, (motivation leads to better performance on the exclusion task), does not illustrate the difference between conscious and unconscious perception. Instead, it provides an example of weakly conscious perception with a conservative response criterion. In normal conditions subjects ignore the 50 ms stimuli, but with increased motivation, they use a less conservative response criterion and make use of their low level conscious perceptions. As a result, they can sometimes exclude the 50 ms target word. The 50 ms stimuli can be phenomenally conscious all along, but this information needs to be enabled and accessed by the subject (by using a less conservative response criterion) before the subject will act on it. This explanation also accounts for the surprising result that inclusion task performance does not improve for motivated subjects. According to Snodgrass and Blocks explanation, the lack of improvement in the inclusion tasks is expected, since subjects will complete the word stem with whatever comes to mind rst, and this will not change if criterion levels are changed or not. According to Visser and Merikles attention explanation, it might be expected that greater attention would lead to improved performance on all tasks, yet inclusion performance remains the same. However, it is not obvious why the attention explanation would predict better inclusion performance, since the rst word to come to mind would presumably not change if subjects were concentrating more. It could therefore be argued that both Visser and Merickles attention explanation (endow) and Snodgrass and Blocks criterion explanation (enable) are consistent with no improvement in the inclusion task. There is however a signicant problem with Block and Snodgrasss claim that exclusion success at the 50 ms level is a result of an enabled phenomenally conscious state. More generally, Snodgrasss reliance on the enable approach in his OT/S model of perception (discussed below) and Blocks application of the enable approach to other experimental paradigms is also problematic.

6. Problems with the enable interpretation of exclusion failure The rst problem that applies to Block and Snodgrasss account of exclusion failure stems from an alternative SDT interpretation of the paradigm in which cases of exclusion failure are argued to be mistakes made by the subject whilst doing a difcult task (Fisk & Haase, 2006). Further to Visser and Merikle (1999) nding that increased motivation improves exclusion success, Fisk and Haase (2006) found that exclusion failure does not always occur. By using standard SDT manipulations of the paradigm, subjects were shown to have access to more information than could be concluded from Visser and Merikles results. Fisk and Haase found that if the exclusion task is made easier for subjects by asking for a two-alternative forced choice decision (choice between two possible words), instead of a (cued) free report, subjects are able to perform above chance on the exclusion instruction around a 50 ms duration.5 They also found that performance on inclusion and exclusion tasks was the same at 43 ms stimulus duration, contrary to Visser and Merikles results. This success at following the exclusion instruction suggests that subjects are conscious of at least some information from the 50 ms stimuli since they can choose the non-target word when presented with only two choices. SDT can explain this improvement in exclusion performance through the differences in strategies required to be successful in these paradigms. When a subject is shown the target reader, then the word stem rea and asked to choose the non-target word from the two alternatives reader and reason, the task is reasonably easy. Subjects can use low level information from the target word such as word shape (e.g. the tall d in reader) to pick out the target word and exclude it. This leads to successful exclusion in the forced-choice paradigm. However, in the standard paradigm, subjects cannot identify the target word precisely enough to successfully follow the same strategy of identifying and excluding the target in order to report a non-target word. Subjects often misidentify and exclude the wrong word, reporting the target word instead. Since there is not enough information to clearly identify the target word in the 50 ms free report condition, exclusion failure prevails. What differs in the two paradigms is not the degree of consciousness or access to information, but the level of information required to perform the tasks successfully within the identify-exclude strategy. Subjects are more successful in the forced-choice than the standard version of the paradigm because they can utilize the same information to greater effect. An experience of low-level or degraded information from the target word is usually sufcient to choose the non-target word from two presented alternatives, but not sufcient to freely identify and exclude the target word, and then report a different, non-target stem completion. The same level of conscious information therefore has greater discriminatory power in the forced-choice paradigm. This alone can explain the different patterns of exclusion success and failure.

5 When two alternative word choices were presented at a discrimination task, exclusion errors were .21 for 57 ms and .45 at 43 ms. When the two choices were not presented, exclusion errors were .35 for 57 ms and .44 for 43 ms. All of these performance levels are signicantly above chance performance for the exclusion instruction. For more see Fisk and Haase (2006), pp. 42464247.

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In this case the original nding of exclusion failure does not stem from subjects being unconscious of the 50 ms stimuli, (Visser and Merikle), or that the 50 ms perceptions are just not cognitively accessed in the right way (Block and Snodgrass). Instead, subjects have cognitive access to only low level stimulus information such as general shape, leading to exclusion failure in the cued free report task, but exclusion success in the two-alternative forced choice task. Therefore there is no need to invoke any difference in conscious states between the two paradigms to explain exclusion failure, since partial cognitive access can account for the results. This is a fairly serious problem for Snodgrass and Blocks interpretation of the exclusion failure paradigm, and this alternative explanation can be applied to other examples that Block points to as cases of phenomenal consciousness without cognitive access (e.g. other qualitative difference paradigms,6 Sperling phenomenon). There are also deeper problems relating to the enable approach used by Snodgrass and Block. These problems apply to Snodgrasss model of unconscious perception, in particular to the assumptions that conscious strategies apply to only conscious, and not unconscious, perceptual processes, and that conscious perception is present down to objective thresholds. Although Block does not follow Snodgrasss model completely, these problems do affect the criteria Block can use in deciding what counts as an example of phenomenal consciousness without cognitive access. 7. Enable or endow? The general case The second set of problems regarding the enable approach deals more generally with Snodgrasss Objective Threshold/ Strategic (OT/S) model of perception (Snodgrass et al., 2004) which is based on a wholesale acceptance of this approach. The OT/S model attempts to differentiate conscious from unconscious perception without running into the problems that normally arise in models of perception. The OT/S model clearly differentiates between detection and identication thresholds, and can be used to provide models that predict performance levels across different types of task. It suggests that typical examples of unconscious perception such perceptual defense and most cases of unconscious priming are cases of weak conscious perception with a conservative response criterion. That is, subjects are conscious of the stimuli, but are not sufciently condent of the information to make full use of it when performing tasks. The OT/S model suggests that subjects are weakly consciousness of stimuli that are present between the objective thresholds (the Objective part of the model) and the subjective threshold. In this area, subjects are phenomenally conscious of enough information to identify or detect the stimulus in a forced choice task, but typically this information is not reported because it is not cognitively accessed. When subjects are pressed (e.g. they are more motivated), they can change their perceptual strategy (the Strategic part of the model) by using a less conservative response criterion. By doing this they can make use of their low level conscious perceptions, thus accessing previously unused information. At the objective detection threshold (ODT), no consciousness of the stimulus is possible. As SDT is neutral with regard to the presence or absence of conscious perception in subjects, the equation of performance thresholds with thresholds of consciousness as stated in the OT/S model requires justication. There are several problems with this model, the rst being the assumption that conscious strategies (such as being highly motivated to perform well) will only signicantly affect conscious perception, and not unconscious perceptual processes. If exclusion failure is caused by weakly conscious perceptions, as the SDT model suggests, participants should be able to control their responses to such stimuli by adopting more lenient response criteria. In contrast, the original (i.e. Visser and Merikles) exclusion model holds that exclusion failure reects unconscious and hence uncontrollable inuences; thus, shifting exclusion decision criteria downward should have no effect (Snodgrass, 2002, p. 560). Snodgrass argues that unconscious processes are uncontrollable and automatic so perceptual strategies would have no effect on them. Shifting decision criteria downward onto unconscious stimuli would not help subjects successfully exclude the target word, since unconscious stimuli are processed automatically. He reasons that since subjects can exclude the 50 ms targets, they are capable of exerting control on these perceptions, so the 50 ms targets must be conscious all along. For Snodgrass, controllability and consciousness are tightly connected. However, Snodgrass claims that conscious strategies such as actively looking for stimuli (looking strategy) or being relaxed and letting stimuli appear (popping strategy) make a small but signicant difference to nearly unconscious perception (i.e. close to the ODT) (Snodgrass & Shevrin, 2006). He and his colleagues claim to have found a real case of perceptual defense for phobics identifying drawings of spiders (Snodgrass ASSC presentation, 2007). There is also evidence that conscious strategies can affect visual processing in V1, which is usually assumed to be unconscious processing (see Martinez et al., 1999; Noesselt et al., 2002). Conscious strategies can affect unconscious perceptual processes, but Snodgrass argues that the effect of conscious strategies on unconscious perception does not involve selective conscious control, but rather produces various nonvolitional or even counter-volitional effects (Snodgrass & Shevrin, 2006, p. 72). Nonvolitional and counter-volitional effects can include those investigated by Dagenbach, Carr, and Wilhelmsen (1989). They found that different conscious strategies are required to complete different judgment tasks, and that these conscious strategies then affect a subjects subsequent performance on a priming task, even when the prime is unconsciously perceived (i.e. is presented near the

6 Qualitative difference paradigms were suggested by Dixon (1971) as a way of differentiating conscious and unconscious perception. He argued that qualitative differences in behaviour indicate the distinction between conscious and unconscious perception. Examples include the exclusion failure paradigm and the false recognition paradigm where subjects have to discriminate between old words that they have previously seen in a study list, and new words that were not in the study list, from a series of match and non-match masked words (Jacoby & Whitehouse, 1989).

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ODT). According to Snodgrass, conscious perception can be selectively, intentionally controlled and unconscious perception cannot be, though conscious strategies may still have some effect on near unconscious perception. Although it seems unlikely that conscious strategies could direct unconscious perceptual processes to successfully follow exclusion instructions, it is not clear which unconscious perceptual processes can be consciously controlled, and to what extent. Subtly different tasks may allow for more or less conscious control of unconscious processes. The degree of conscious control possible over specic unconscious processes may be dependent on the complex neural architecture underlying perceptual processing. This contrasts with Snodgrasss suggestion of a stringent threshold under which no control is possible. If conscious control of unconscious processes is possible, then some cases of perception may unfairly be labeled conscious simply in virtue of being controllable, when they are in fact cases of unconscious perception that are capable of being consciously controlled to some degree. Snodgrasss equation of intentional controllability with consciousness is therefore a dubious one. Snodgrass makes another questionable assumption in his OT/S model that follows the enable approach. He states that response behavior can, under the right task instructions (e.g. in a forced choice task), be made to follow the same pattern all the way down to the ODT. At the ODT, responses change radically and cannot be affected by the same kinds of variables that are capable of changing the response criterion at longer stimulus durations. This indicates that a different kind of perception occurs at the ODT. Perception above the subjective threshold is conscious, and since perception between the ODT and the subjective threshold can be made to resemble fully conscious perception, Snodgrass argues that this level of perception is also conscious, though not to the same degree. Subjects are therefore conscious of stimuli down to the ODT, but do not typically access this information; this is the case of phenomenal consciousness without cognitive access. A standard criticism of this view is that the term consciousness in Snodgrasss model covers too much. This is a standard comment on objective measures of awareness, since the forced choice tasks that dene objective thresholds seem as though they might be completed using unconscious perception. Lau (in press) argues that objective measures are good measures of information processing but not necessarily good measures of conscious processing, since objective and subjective measures (that do obviously index conscious processing) do not always correlate. The standard problematic example is blindsight in which some normal perceptual behaviors can be observed but patients report very little conscious perceptual experience (see e.g. Weiskrantz, 1986). Other cases that exhibit dissociations between behavior and reported experience, such as the loss of experience of color in achromotopsia (Kentridge, Heywood, & Cowey, 2004), and loss of experience of motion (Heywood & Zihl, 1999) are equally problematic. If all perception above the ODT is dened as being conscious, then consciousness denotes a particular type of processing and response, not necessarily the presence of subjective states. The standard SDT-informed response to this is to state that subjects can give positive condence ratings to their perceptions down to the ODT, and that these ratings can be used to predict performance on subsequent tasks (e.g. see Haase & Fisk, 2004). Although subjects often need cajoling into giving condence ratings for their perceptions of stimuli near the ODT, (Snodgrass, personal communication), when asked, subjects seem to be conscious of stimuli at objective thresholds despite not freely reporting the presence or identity of stimuli at these levels. However, for supporters of an endow approach to perception, this may simply suggest that, when forced to give condence ratings, subjects are partly conscious at these levels, and when not forced, they are not conscious at these levels. The act of responding in forced choice tasks may change the nature of the perceptual processing of near threshold stimuli. The link between condence ratings and consciousness also must be argued for, as self-monitoring tasks such as forming condence judgments may occur unconsciously (Koriat, 2007). It is certain that some information below the subjective threshold of free report is conscious (e.g. partial awareness of stimuli may be present). However, the questions of how much is conscious, and what the nature of this consciousness is, cannot be solved by pointing to the discrepancy between performance on forced choice (objective) and (cued) free report (subjective) tasks. Both types of tasks demand action from the subject, and it is precisely this action that may change the nature of the perceptual process and corresponding levels of awareness. This problem of whether subjects are always (partly) aware of stimuli near objective thresholds, or whether being forced to act makes this information conscious, is at the heart of the enable vs. endow debate, and looks like an unsolvable one. Without pre-dening consciousness and getting into a circular argument, there is no way of conclusively showing that conscious strategies can affect only conscious perceptions, or that all perception above the objective threshold is conscious. As an account of perception that relies on response patterns to measure consciousness, Snodgrasss OT/S model is forced to rely on the ODT to distinguish phenomenally conscious from unconscious perception, since it is only here that response patterns change. Alternative accounts suggest that partial cognitive access can account for exclusion failure that unconscious perception may be controllable to some degree, and that consciousness may be endowed when subjects are forced to act. The problems discussed above also threaten many of the examples Block points to as cases of phenomenal consciousness without cognitive access. As Kouider, de Gardelle, and Dupoux (2007) note, Blocks examples are of two types; those that succumb to the partial awareness account (e.g. exclusion failure, Sperling phenomenon), and others that can be explained by an endow attention-based account (e.g. change and inattentional blindness). Snodgrass and Blocks enable account of the exclusion failure paradigm is highly problematic, and their general reliance on the enable account in their models of phenomenal consciousness with cognitive access is difcult to justify.

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8. Access or reexive consciousness Block and Snodgrass argue that exclusion failure is based on subjects being phenomenally conscious of stimuli but not making use of this information: information is phenomenally conscious but not cognitively accessed or made available for reasoning and evaluating. However, the exclusion failure paradigm and similar qualitative difference paradigms are designed around a conception of consciousness that ignores lower levels of access and conscious information processing. In extending the idea of partial cognitive accessibility it will be suggested that exclusion failure effects are not the result of a lack of cognitive access. Block (2001, 2005) discusses perceptual paradigms similar to the exclusion failure paradigm, and argues that a subject must be capable of some sort of reection or internal monologue in order to successfully follow the exclusion instruction. The subject must be able to recognize that the rst word they thought of to complete the stem was probably the target word they just saw, and then think of some other word instead. In the conscious case (i.e. above subjective threshold: successful exclusion), the subject must have a state that is about the subjects own perceptual experience. . ...and thus the sense of conscious that is relevant here is what might be termed a reexive sense (Block, 2001, Section 2). The complexity of the paradigm ensures that following exclusion instructions is difcult even at the 250 ms duration: Tony Jack tells me that many of his subjects in this paradigm complained about how much effort was required to follow the exclusion instructions (Block, 2001, Section 2). This sort of task requires concentration and a degree of internal reection and reasoning that does not come easily to subjects. In a later discussion of the paradigm, Block concludes that There is, therefore, evidence in the exclusion case of experiential contents (e.g. as of seeing reason) without the kind of access required for report, planning, decision-making, evaluation of alternatives, memory and voluntary control of attention, (Block, 2005, p. 49). However, there is a signicant problem for Block in describing just what sort of consciousness is necessary for successful exclusion of the target word. Block states that global accessibility (access consciousness) does not logically require reexivity. . .reexivity is a special kind of access (Block, 2001, Section 2). Successful exclusion seems to depend on some sort of reasoning about the subjects own internal states and experiences, so reexive processes are necessary in addition to standard rst order access consciousness. In this case, exclusion failure indicates a lack of reexive processing, which does not mean a lack of access consciousness altogether. Cases of exclusion failure therefore cannot be taken to be cases of phenomenal consciousness without cognitive access. This argument applies not only to the exclusion failure paradigm, but can also be leveled at other qualitative difference paradigms like the false memory task that depend on complex reexive processes. Results from these paradigms cannot therefore be used as examples of phenomenal consciousness without cognitive access. Snodgrass and colleagues do not strictly follow Blocks tripartite distinction and state that the important distinction is between phenomenal consciousness and reective consciousness. According to them, the subjective threshold indexes higher order reective awareness via higher order metacognitive process involving reecting upon and evaluating various phenomenal contents, (Snodgrass et al., 2004, p. 863). Perception above the subjective threshold is reexively conscious, while perception below this threshold is weakly or phenomenally conscious. While Snodgrass et al.s account does not succumb to the same problems as Blocks does, Fisk and Haases alternative interpretation of exclusion failure discussed above can be used to argue that even high order, metacognitive, reective processes can be present in cases of exclusion failure. The information and strategies required to successfully perform the exclusion task in the standard and forced-choice paradigms are very different. Subjects in the forced-choice paradigm may experience the tall d in reader, then when they are presented with two alternative responses reader and reason, deduce that what they saw was reader. They can then select the non-target alternative since it is clearly a different shape. That is, subjects can be reectively aware of word shape, and use high order reasoning abilities to exclude the target. Subjects in the standard paradigm might also perceive the general shape of reader, and deduce that what they saw was realm, since this word also has a tall letter near the middle of the word. In excluding realm they may report reader, thus failing at the task. Subjects do not lack the ability to reason with the information they have experienced, but they have insufcient information to use the identify-exclude strategy to reach the correct response. Therefore what subjects lack in the standard paradigm is not reective consciousness or the ability to perform complex cognitive tasks, but high quality sensory information necessary for this kind of reasoning to consistently reach the correct response. Therefore exclusion failure does not indicate a lack of higher order awareness or access to information. Exclusion failure can however be used to assess the level and detail of information subjects experience different experimental conditions. Neither author has successfully argued that exclusion failure provides an example of phenomenal consciousness without access (Block) or reective (Snodgrass) consciousness. Working within Blocks own framework, it is possible that subjects can have cognitive access but no reexive consciousness of the 50 ms target words and so fail to exclude them. Therefore exclusion failure is consistent with the presence of some cognitive access. A criticism of Snodgrasss position can be made following the partial awareness account of Fisk and Haase. Exclusion failure can occur simply from the lack of a sufciently detailed experience of a target word. The weak encoding of information that is available from a 50 ms display, rather than a lack of higher order conscious reasoning, results in failure at the exclusion task. Therefore cases of exclusion failure cannot be taken to be cases of phenomenal consciousness without access/reective consciousness, and results from similar qualitative difference paradigms cannot be used in this way either.

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9. Conclusions Block and Snodgrasss claims that SDT can be used to identify access/reective and phenomenal consciousness, and that the exclusion failure paradigm provides an experimental example of phenomenal consciousness without access/reective consciousness, are seriously awed. Subjects can be aware of low level features of stimuli; subjective approaches effectively ignore this partial awareness while objective approaches assess it in forced choice tasks. Snodgrass claims that only conscious perception is capable of being controlled by conscious strategies, yet he has shown that conscious strategies can signicantly affect perception near the ODT. There is thus the possibility of some conscious control of unconscious perception. There is also room to question Snodgrasss assumption that all perception above the objective threshold is conscious. This use of conscious denotes only a measure of behavior relating to perceptual processes, and ignores the possibility that the act of assessing perception using objective measures changes the nature of the perceptual processing itself. This possibility is at the heart of the enable and endow question and cannot be ruled out by pointing to differences in subjective and objective performance levels. Therefore there are no conclusive arguments in favor of Block and Snodgrasss enable account of the exclusion failure paradigm, or for Snodgrasss enable approach as outlined in the OT/S model. The nal problem relates to the way in which access/reective consciousness is ascribed (or not) to subjects by Block and Snodgrass. They suggest that exclusion failure occurs from a lack of higher order conscious processing, but it can be more simply explained by the availability of only poor quality encoded information from the short 50 ms stimulus duration. Subjects may be aware and able to reason about the information that is available in the visual system, but this low level of information is often not sufcient to successfully identify and exclude the target work in the standard paradigm. Therefore the exclusion failure paradigm cannot be used as an example of isolated phenomenal consciousness, and the enable and OT/S models used to interpret the paradigm in this way require further justication. It remains to be seen if or how SDT can be used to provide a comprehensive model of perception. It appears that positive and negative responses are just responses, and can no more be taken to indicate differences in types of consciousness than to indicate the difference between conscious and unconscious perception. A response is just a report of a decision, made on the basis of strong or weak perceptual evidence that may be affected by motivation, attention, and task load. As argued above, a negative decision does not rule out the presence of reexive consciousness of a stimulus, let alone access consciousness. These methodological problems suggest that nding evidence of phenomenal consciousness without cognitive accessibility is even more difcult than rst imagined, and that the use of SDT thresholds to index different types of consciousness needs further argument. Acknowledgements I am grateful to the many helpful suggestions made by reviewers, particularly Ned Block and J.M. Snodgrass for their discussions of earlier versions of this paper. References
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