ReviewPsychonomic bulletin & review2024
Progressing, not regressing: A possible solution to the problem of regression to the mean in unconscious processing studies.
Review in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Unconscious cognition without post hoc selection artifacts: From selective analysis to functional dissociations.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Increasing power for detecting awareness: a new approach to test group level objective performance.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Replicating the unconscious working memory effect: a multisite Registered Report.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- The Subliminal Threshold Estimation Procedure (STEP): A calibration method tailored for estimating subliminal thresholds.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Kelley's Paradox and strength skewness in research on unconscious mental processes.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
- The Conscious Side of 'Subliminal' Linguistic Priming: A Systematic Review With Meta-Analysis and Reliability Analysis of Visibility Measures.Journal of cognition · 2025Article
- The influence of signal strength on conscious and nonconscious neural processing of emotional faces.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
- Object relations are processed with, but not without, awareness.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
- Training can enhance unconscious response priming on fast trials even when measuring consciousness on a trial-by-trial basis.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
- New methods, old questions: advancing the study of unconscious perception.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Review
- In Search of an Integrative Method to Study Unconscious Processing: An Application of Bayesian and General Recognition Theory Models to the Processing of Hierarchical Patterns in the Absence of Awareness.Journal of cognition · 2025Article
- A measure of reliability convergence to select and optimize cognitive tasks for individual differences research.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Consciousness Under the Spotlight: The Problem of Measuring Subjective Experience.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive scienceReview
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
How convincing is current evidence for unconscious processing? Recently, a major criticism suggested that some, if not much, of this evidence might be explained by a mere statistical phenomenon: regression to the mean (RttM). Excluding participants based on an awareness assessment is a common practice in studies of unconscious processing, and this post hoc data selection might lead to false effects that are driven by RttM for aware participants wrongfully classified as unaware. Here, we examined this criticism using both simulations and data from 12 studies probing unconscious processing (35 effects overall). In line with the original criticism, we confirmed that the reliability of awareness measures in the field is concerningly low. Yet, using simulations, we showed that reliability measures might be unsuitable for estimating error in awareness measures. Furthermore, we examined other solutions for assessing whether an effect is genuine or reflects RttM; all suffered from substantial limitations, such as a lack of specificity to unconscious processing, lack of power, or unjustified assumptions. Accordingly, we suggest a new nonparametric solution, which enjoys high specificity and relatively high power. Together, this work emphasizes the need to account for measurement error in awareness measures and evaluate its consequences for unconscious processing effects. It further suggests a way to meet the important challenge posed by RttM, in an attempt to establish a reliable and robust corpus of knowledge in studying unconscious processing.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.