| FORM: | ARTICLE |
| Author: | Natsoulas, Thomas |
| Affiliation: | U California, Dept of Psychology, Davis, CA, USA |
| Title: | Blindsight and consciousness. |
| Source: | American Journal of Psychology, 1997 Spr, 1997. 110 (1): p.1-33Reference. |
| Language: | English |
| Subjects: | Thesaurus terms: Awareness Consciousness States Visual Perception |
| Added Keywords: | analysis of blindsight &role in understanding consciousness |
| Classification Code: | Sensory Perception (2320) |
| Population Terms: Human | |
| Abstract: | Discusses the implications for understanding consciousness by focusing on the concept of blindsight, a behavioral pattern that is exhibited under certain conditions by people with damaged striate cortex. Topics addressed include (1) the basis on which people report seeing something in particular; (2) 2 interpretations of blindsighted Subjects’ forced-choice guessing as affected by perceptual judgments outside Subjects’ awareness or as based on “pure perceptual knowledge” of which Subjects have awareness, though this “knowledge” is nonconsciously acquired; (3) whether blindsight is “behavior divorced from awareness”; and (4) an interpretation of blindsight as a matter of responding to internal occurrences. It is argued that despite many psychologists’ opinion, it is not clear that blindsight has distinctive implications for understanding consciousness, aside from conscious visual experience requiring adequate striate cortex. ((c) 1999 APA/PsycINFO, all rights reserved) |