Unconscious or underpowered? Probabilistic cuing of visual attention.

Abstract

Recent debate about the reliability of psychological research has raised concerns about the prevalence of false positives in our discipline. However, false negatives can be just as concerning in areas of research that depend on finding support for the absence of an effect. This risk is particularly high in unconscious learning experiments, where researchers commonly seek to demonstrate that people can learn to perform a task in the absence of any explicit knowledge of the information that drives performance. The fact that some unconscious learning effects are typically studied with small samples and unreliable awareness measures makes false negatives especially likely. In the present article we focus on a popular unconscious learning paradigm, probabilistic cuing of visual attention, as a case study. Firstly, we show that, at the meta-analytic level, previous experiments reveal positive signs of participant awareness, although individual studies are severely underpowered to detect this. Secondly, we report the results of two empirical studies in which participants' awareness was tested with alternative and more sensitive dependent measures, both of which manifest positive evidence of awareness. We also show that, based on the predictions of a formal model of probabilistic cuing and given the reliabilities of the dependent measures collected in these experiments, any statistical test aimed at detecting a significant correlation between learning and awareness is doomed to return a non-significant result, even if at the latent level both constructs are actually related and participants' knowledge is completely explicit.

Probabilistic cuing of visual search: Neither implicit nor inflexible.

“…In the case of the probabilistic cuing task, the inclusion of an unbiased stage may cause awareness about the distribution of targets during the biased stage to be underestimated. Consistent with this, in the meta-analysis by Vadillo, Linssen et al (2020), experiments that measured awareness immediately after a biased stage (h = 0.52, 95% CI [0.32, 0.72]) found greater signs of awareness of the bias than those that measured awareness after the unbiased stage (h = 0.26,CI [0.11,0.41]).…”

“…Probabilistic cuing of visual search 17 results are the first direct experimental confirmation of the hypotheses put forward by Vadillo, Linssen et al (2020) in the light of their meta-analytic results.…”

“…Thus, 78 and 79 participants were included in the Awareness-first and Unbiased-first groups, respectively. Trials immediately following a rest break (five in total) were discarded, as in previous experiments from our laboratory (Vadillo, Linssen et al, 2020), given that response times (RT) for these trials might be anomalously slow because participants are sometimes not totally ready for the search task. Trials with RTs greater than 10 sec and with incorrect responses were removed from the analyses.…”

“…(for a review, see Vadillo, Linssen et al, 2020). This sample size may be too small to detect a decrease in the magnitude of the probabilistic cuing effect through the unbiased stage, therefore leading to the incorrect conclusion that probabilistic cuing is inflexible.…”

Statistical Learning of Target Location Probability in Children and Adults

“…In addition, few participants who correctly identified the rich quadrant did not show greater LPL than those who did not recognize the uneven target distribution (Twedell et al, 2017). Although a recent meta-analysis has questioned the implicit nature of LPL and suggested a relation between awareness and LPL (Vadillo, Linssen, Orgaz, Parsons, & Shanks, 2020), LPL still contains considerable features of implicit learning in general.…”