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From a simple tilted Gabor patch to a face with complex social or emotional content, prior studies suggest that people can process subliminal sensory information without any reportable experience. More strikingly, they can make decisions or judgments consistent with those subliminal stimuli. However, critics question the validity of subjective awareness reports: no method guarantees that saying “I saw nothing” means participants truly lacked conscious experience of the stimuli. In a seminal study, Peters and Lau (2015) combined metacognitive judgments with a novel blinding paradigm and concluded that accurate decisions occur only when stimuli are consciously seen, that is, no unconscious perception. In this talk, I follow Michel’s (2020) argument by analyzing a potential imbalance in the information used for primary versus subsequent metacognitive judgments, which could undermine Peters and Lau’s conclusion. I also propose a new route that leverages the nature of human perceptual confidence ratings to address this methodological challenge in studies of unconscious perception.
