Ignorance Is Not Bliss: On Issues Measuring the Awareness of Suboptimal Stimuli

Abstract

It is standard practice to assess participants’ perception of suboptimal stimuli by using an awareness measure. Yet the assessment of stimulus awareness is a difficult issue in masked priming studies; there is no standard for what constitutes participants’ conscious “awareness” nor what measure is best to assess awareness. Nonetheless, researchers make claims of participant (un)awareness based on idiosyncratic operationalizations of “awareness” and unstandardized practices for testing awareness. This unstandardized practice can lead to spurious conclusions based on faulty assumptions. The current work adds to an ongoing discussion on the methodology of the field by drawing attention to how operational definitions and tasks impact the results obtained from experiments. The concept of awareness is briefly discussed, work testing awareness across three attempts is presented, each using different oft-employed awareness measures that render different empirical conclusions, and finally the article discusses choosing an awareness measure that reflects one's research goal.