Abstract

Lesion to the primary visual area in the brain abolishes visual awareness. And yet, patients with such lesions can perform forced-choice visual detection or discrimination tasks better than chance. In performing these tasks, however, they claim that they are only guessing, that is they have little confidence that they are correct. This paper considers whether this reported lack of confidence could help us to characterize the apparent lack of visual awareness. In other words, do confidence and awareness always go together? Or are there other consistent relationships between the two such that we could use confidence ratings as measures of visual awareness? We highlight why the approach of using confidence ratings to assess the level of visual awareness is better than the currently dominant approach, which is to use forced-choice performance itself as an index of awareness. But we also discuss potential pitfalls, both technical and conceptual, in interpreting confidence ratings in relation to visual awareness