Calibration in Consciousness Science

Abstract

To study consciousness, scientists need to determine when participants are conscious and when they are not. They do so with consciousness detection procedures. A recurring skeptical argument against those procedures is that they cannot be calibrated: there is no way to make sure that detection outcomes are accurate. In this article, I address two main skeptical arguments purporting to show that consciousness scientists cannot calibrate detection procedures. I conclude that there is nothing wrong with calibration in consciousness science.

The Perceptual Awareness Scale—recent controversies and debates

“…The possibly most important challenge to PAS is a challenge to all proposed measures of consciousness: How do we decide what constitutes a good measure? We have previously defended that PAS is a good measure of consciousness because it correlates well with performance—knowing that it in a certain sense is a difficult argument because it might add the unwarranted assumption that consciousness and performance always correlate in nature (but see Michel (2021) for an analysis of why such a strong assumption is not necessary—or even ideal—in practice). Given the fundamental assumption for PAS, mentioned above, the strongest argument in favour of PAS is that participants say the scale represents how they experience clarity of perception.…”

Confidence in consciousness research

“…This is true both when stimuli are presented in his sighted field, but also for stimuli he reported being aware of in his 'blind' field. Meanwhile, the rate of 12 Absence of visual awareness in blindsight can be established independently of confidence-based procedures (Azzopardi & Cowey, 1997;Persaud & Cowey, 2008;Michel & Lau, 2021), thus allowing an independent evaluation of those procedures in blindsight patients (Michel, 2021). advantageous bets falls dramatically for subthreshold stimuli, despite performing well above chance on a discrimination task (Figure 7A).…”

“…To study (un)conscious perception and test hypotheses about consciousness, scientists need procedures for determining whether subjects consciously perceive stimuli or not-consciousness detection procedures (Irvine, 2012a(Irvine, , 2012bMichel, 2021;Spener, 2020). This article discusses a family of detection procedures called 'confidence-based procedures' (Morales & Lau, forthcoming;Norman & Price, 2015).…”

“…(...) In contrast, by collecting trial-by-trial measures of performance and metacognitive judgments we can build up a picture of an individual's bias, sensitivity and efficiency in a particular domain. (p.5) Instead, one can assess consciousness based on patterns of responses obtained throughout an experiment or condition of an experiment, sometimes across subjects (Michel, 2021). As Timmermans and Cleeremans (2015) write, by doing so "one abandons the ability to establish, for any single stimulus, whether it was consciously perceived or not, simply because computing correlations requires many trials" (p.38).…”

Can the Integrated Information Theory Explain Consciousness from Consciousness Itself?

“…Perhaps this impasse can be overcome from within the experiment-driven approach: finessing consciousness detection procedures and calibrating different measures of consciousness (Michel 2021;Seth et al 2008), paired with accumulation of new evidence, might help decide between competing models of consciousness.…”