The role of conscious awareness in perceptual learning

Halchin, Adelina-Mihaela 2023. The role of conscious awareness in perceptual learning. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

Adaptively learning from encountered visual information is a fundamental skill that can translate into changes at both the behavioural level and at the subjective, conscious experience level. However, the conditions needed for such visual perceptual learning (VPL) to take place are not well understood. It has been proposed that VPL can occur even when the visual information driving the learning is removed from awareness – a finding with implications about the scope of unconscious processing and the function(s) of consciousness. This thesis seeks, first, to re-evaluate the claim that VPL can occur from unconscious information. In Chapter 1, I provide an overview of the literature on VPL and the challenges of studying effects from unconscious visual information. Chapters 2 and 3 detail novel experimental work attempting to drive two different kinds of VPL with unconscious information in different paradigms: two-tone image disambiguation (Chapter 2) and contrast discrimination learning (Chapter 3). The learning conditions in both chapters are contrasted with carefully selected control conditions. In both chapters, there was Bayesian evidence that learning occurred under some experimental circumstances, but crucially, there was no differential advantage of the learning compared to the control conditions. This pattern suggests that the observed learning effects could not be attributed exclusively to the training on unconscious stimuli. Each chapter includes considerations about measurements of awareness and/or learning. Chapter 4 specifically turns towards the issue of measuring (lack of) consciousness, to explore how changes in a widely used subjective measurement, the Perceptual Awareness Scale, relate to changes in task performance. Collating and re-analysing data from Chapters 2 and 3, alongside datasets from 11 published articles, the results highlighted substantial heterogeneity across studies in the relationship between PAS and task performance. Altogether, as discussed in Chapter 5, these results challenge previous conclusions of VPL from unconscious information, and provide rich explorations of whether and how different experimental design choices impact conclusions about awareness and learning.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Psychology
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	30 May 2024
Last Modified:	04 Jun 2024 10:27
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/169299

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