Introduction: Dissociated Issues

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses various issues related to dissociations. Capacity in the absence of, or independent of, explicit awareness has come under heavy scrutiny in phenomena such as repetition priming, backward central masking, and lexical decision. Evidence for distinctions between residual capacity and acknowledged awareness is often based on single dissociations, while independent systems or processes require the use of double dissociations. Therefore, especially in the area of subliminal perception, quantitative differences can be reliably measured between objective discriminative thresholds and the threshold for subjective awareness. Such investigations raise the question of whether it is possible to measure awareness or nonawareness differences in animals. Each of the neuropsychological domains within which awareness or nonawareness dissociations have been reported has generated domain-specific dissociative descriptions.