Consciousness Under the Spotlight: The Problem of Measuring Subjective Experience.
Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science January 1, 2025 Mikel Jimenez, Antonio Prieto, José Antonio Hinojosa et al. 16 citations
The study of consciousness faces unique challenges because it investigates subjective experience, which is accessible only from a first-person perspective, unlike objective third-person phenomena in other sciences. This article reviews historical and contemporary efforts to measure consciousness and its absence, focusing on two main approaches: objective performance-based measures and subjective report-based measures of awareness. It compares their advantages and disadvantages, evaluates them against methodological criteria, and discusses transforming both into a common sensitivity measure (d') for comparison. New approaches are explored, including Bayesian models to support claims of absent awareness and machine-learning decoding models, alongside future challenges such as measuring qualia—the qualitative contents of awareness.