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Betting the house on consciousness

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Studying consciousness is difficult because asking subjects to report their awareness of a stimulus perturbs that awareness. A new paper shows that asking subjects to wager on whether their response is correct can solve this problem.

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Figure 1: A conventional psychometric curve (blue), linking some stimulus parameter in a binary task to performance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Biology and Division of Engineering and Applied Science,

    Christof Koch & Kerstin Preuschoff

  2. Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, 216-76, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, 91125, California, USA

    Christof Koch & Kerstin Preuschoff

Authors
  1. Christof Koch
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  2. Kerstin Preuschoff
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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Koch, C., Preuschoff, K. Betting the house on consciousness. Nat Neurosci 10, 140–141 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn0207-140

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