The visual system can integrate fragmented input into organized surfaces and objects, a process called perceptual integration. Whether this requires conscious access was tested using the attentional blink, which impairs conscious perception. Behaviorally, the attentional blink reduced accurate conscious decisions about integrated surface structure. Yet, multivariate EEG decoding showed the brain still represented integrated percepts even when conscious access was blocked. In contrast, masking impaired both conscious decisions and neural decoding of integration, while leaving feedforward signals intact. These findings indicate that perceptual integration can occur without access to consciousness, dissociating the two processes.
Confidence reports during perceptual decision-making do not uniquely reflect subjective experience. Across two experiments with 204 participants and three bias manipulations, non-perceptual factors such as changes in stimulus base rates or asymmetric payoff matrices leaked into confidence judgments. This shows that confidence can be influenced by response biases unrelated to actual perception, complicating its use as a pure measure of subjective experience. The relative strength of biases in first-order choices versus confidence may help distinguish whether a manipulation truly alters perception or only affects decision strategy.