Methodological Pitfalls in the “Objective” Approach to Consciousness: Comments on Busch et al. (2009)

One major problem in the empirical investigation of consciousness is to identify a so-called objective measure of the presence or absence of a specific conscious experience. An objective measure, in this context, refers to a measure of how well a subject is able to solve a task or to a report, given by the subject, which does not explicity refer to his or her own conscious experience. Such task performance or report may be influenced by conscious as well as unconscious processes. Subjective measures, on the other hand, are defined as reports (verbal or other kinds) made by a subject directly about his or her conscious experience. The paper by Busch, Fründ, and Herrmann (2009) is an important and interesting suggestion of how to find neural correlates involved in change detection and change blindness, but it also claims to infer knowledge about conscious experiences from its data. This...