Bias and blindsight: A reply to Michel and Lau (2021)

According to the textbooks, blindsight is a neuropsychological condition characterized by preserved capacities for voluntary visual discrimination unaccompanied by visual awareness. So construed, blindsight precipitated a revolution in theorizing consciousness. In Phillips (Psychological Review, 2021), I argued that the textbooks are wrong and the revolution ill-founded. Blindsight is exclusively a matter of conscious, albeit qualitatively degraded, vision which appears unconscious because of conservative response bias. Michel and Lau (Psychological Review, 2021) object: first, that residual awareness in blindsight cannot account for patients' impressive, feature-specific discriminatory abilities; and second, that performance matching makes response-bias explanations of unreported awareness implausible. They then offer a positive picture of blindsight as a specific deficit of detection, locating this idea within a framework which distinguishes perceptual from response bias. Here, I explain why neither objection convinces. I then argue that Michel and Lau give us no good reason to prefer their approach to our simpler, conscious-vision-only alternative. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).