Consciousness of targets during the attentional blink: A gradual or all-or-none dimension

# The Author(s) 2010. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract Models of consciousness differ in whether they predict a gradual change or a discontinuous transition between nonconscious and conscious perception. Sergent and Dehaene (Psychological Science, 15, 720–728, 2004) asked subjects to rate on a continuous scale the subjective visibility of target words presented during an attentional blink. They found that these words were either detected as well as targets outside the attentional-blink period or not detected at all, and interpreted these results as support for a discontinuous transition between nonconscious and conscious processing. We present results from 4 attentional-blink experiments showing that this all-or-none rating pattern disappears with the use of an alternative measure of consciousness (post-decision wagering) and a more difficult identification task. Instead, under these circum-stances, subjects used the consciousness rating scales in a continuous fashion. These results are more consistent with models that assume a gradual change between non-conscious and conscious perception during the attentional blink