Subjective measures of unconscious knowledge

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Psychological Measurement

Background:

• Unconscious knowledge refers to information that is possessed and utilized without conscious awareness.
• Assessing unconscious knowledge requires methods that demonstrate both the presence of knowledge and the lack of awareness of possessing it.

Purpose of the Study:

• To provide an overview of subjective measures for assessing unconscious knowledge.
• To differentiate between awareness of judgment and awareness of the underlying structural knowledge.

Main Methods:

• Utilizing confidence ratings after judgments to assess awareness of knowing.
• Employing the guessing criterion (judgments above baseline, perceived as guessing) and the zero-correlation criterion (confidence unrelated to accuracy).
• Distinguishing between judgment knowledge and structural knowledge, and assessing the conscious status of both.

Main Results:

• The guessing and zero-correlation criteria provide evidence for unconscious knowledge by indicating a dissociation between accuracy and subjective awareness.
• These methods can be adapted to address issues of bias and utilize various confidence scales.
• Experimental paradigms like artificial grammar learning and serial reaction time tasks were used to investigate these measures.

Conclusions:

• Subjective measures, particularly confidence ratings, are valuable tools for inferring the presence of unconscious knowledge.
• A clear distinction between judgment knowledge and structural knowledge is crucial for a comprehensive assessment of unconscious cognition.
• Control over knowledge use can also serve as a subjective indicator of judgment knowledge.