Consciousness can overflow report: Novel evidence from attribute amnesia of a single stimulus

There is a long-standing debate on whether visual consciousness is confined to cognitive access measured by reportability, or whether it is rich and overflows reportability. Much of the debate in previous studies concentrated on whether information outside attentional focus could be consciously experienced and reportable. This study sought to address the debate from a new perspective, through testing whether fully attended supraliminal information is necessarily reportable with a variation of attribute amnesia. Participants were asked to judge the parity of a single number or whether a Chinese character referred to furniture. After several trials, they were unexpectedly asked to report the stimulus identity. The results consistently showed that participants could not correctly report the identity, indicating that fully attended information that was consciously perceived could sometimes overflow report. In addition to providing novel overflow evidence, these findings also have crucial implications in understanding the relationship between consciousness and working memory.