The dissociation paradigm and its discontents: How can unconscious perception or memory be inferred?

Erdelyi does us all a great service by his customarily incisive discussion of the various ways in which our field tends to neglect, confuse, and misunderstand numerous critical issues in attempting to differentiate conscious from unconscious perception and memory. Although no single commentary could hope to comprehensively assess these issues, I will address Erdelyi's three main points: (1) How (and if) the dissociation paradigm can be used to validly infer unconscious perception; (2) The implications of below-chance effects; and (3) The role of time. I suggest that (a) significant progress on construct validity issues is possible; (b) below-chance effects are part of a more general bidirectional phenomenon, very likely unconscious, and do not threaten absolute subliminality; and (c) practice/learning effects pose potential difficulties for time-based dissociation paradigms.

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