Perceptual awareness occurs along a graded continuum: No evidence of all-or-none failures in continuous reproduction tasks

Does sensory information reach conscious awareness in a discrete, all-or-nothing manner, or a gradual, continuous manner? To answer this question, we examined behavioral performance across four different paradigms that manipulate visual awareness: the attentional blink, backwards masking, the Sperling iconic memory paradigm, and retro-cueing. We then asked how well we could account for participants’ (total N=112 adult participants) behavior using a signal detection framework that factors in psychophysical scaling to model participants’ responses along a single continuum. We found that this model easily accounted for the data from each of these diverse paradigms. Moreover, we re-analyzed the data from prior studies that had argued for a discrete view of perceptual awareness and found that our continuous signal detection model outperformed the models that had been used to support an all-or-nothing view of consciousness. This set of data is consistent with the idea that conscious awareness occurs along a graded continuum.