Individual differences in prioritization for consciousness and the conscious detection of changes.
Consciousness and cognition – March 01, 2025
Source: PubMed
Summary
Individuals vary significantly in how quickly they become aware of non-conscious visual stimuli, with a sample of 97 participants showing that faster prioritization to awareness correlates with better performance in change blindness tasks. In a follow-up study with 99 participants, this correlation remained strong, unaffected by other perceptual-decision making factors. These findings highlight that the speed of awareness prioritization is closely linked to conscious experiences, suggesting that individual differences in consciousness can influence how we perceive and respond to visual changes in our environment.
Abstract
A recent discovery documented robust and reliable individual differences in how quickly people become aware of non-conscious visual stimuli (Sklar, Goldstein, et al., 2021). Given the seemingly large role that conscious experiences play in our lives, this trait is likely to be associated with later cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes. Here we examine the possible implications of this trait to perceptual conscious experiences. In two experiments we demonstrate that the speed of prioritization to awareness is correlated with the ability to notice changes in a change blindness paradigm. The first experiment (N = 97) found a correlation between prioritization speed and multiple parameters of change blindness performance. The second, preregistered, replication experiment (N = 99), further demonstrated that variability in other perceptual-decision making tasks cannot account for this correlation. The results of both experiments suggest that prioritization speed is tightly related with conscious experiences in other situations.