Operationalizing Consciousness: Subjective Report and Task Performance

Abstract

There are two distinct but related threads in this article. The first is methodological and is aimed at exploring the relative merits and faults of different operational definitions of consciousness. The second is conceptual and is aimed at understanding the prior commitments regarding the nature of conscious content that motivate these positions. I consider two distinct operationalizations: one defines consciousness in terms of dichotomous subjective reports, the other in terms of graded subjective reports. I ultimately argue that both approaches are inadequate and that a third alternative that involves integration of subjective report and task performance should be adopted.

Microaggressions and Objectivity: Experimental Measures and Lived Experience

“…Te DLE scale is a so-called "selfreport" or "subjective" measure, since study participants more or less transparently report information in which experimenters are interested for its own sake (in contrast to behavioral measures or other indirect measures). Self-report measures are common in psychological research on "subjective" constructs like subjective well-being (Alexandrova 2008) or conscious visual experience (Boone 2013), where a "construct" in psychology is a theoretical term whose quantity can be measured (Stone 2019(Stone , 1250.…”