The Doctrine of Concordance is the assumption that cognitive processes, behavior, and conscious experience are tightly linked. Tulving and Schwartz challenged this, showing that conscious experience can be absent during cognitive tasks or uncorrelated with behavior. Despite progress, some memory research—particularly on dual- vs. single-process theories of recognition memory, remember/know judgments, and retrospective confidence—still implicitly endorses this doctrine. In contrast, research on metacognitive disconnects in learning, recognition illusions, déjà vu, and aha experiences demonstrates dissociations between the mechanisms creating conscious experience and underlying cognitive processes. Understanding these dissociations is key to grasping how the mind operates.
Continuous flash suppression (CFS) is a technique used to study conscious and nonconscious perception, but key questions remain about how it suppresses visual information and what level of visual processing can occur without awareness. This review evaluates how different experimental setups and methods for assessing consciousness affect results in CFS studies. Evidence indicates that low-level visual information can survive suppression and be processed nonconsciously, while high-level visual recognition is completely impaired under CFS. The authors conclude there is no evidence for nonconscious high-level recognition with this technique.