Szczepanowski, R.
Wroclaw Faculty of Psychology, Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Grunwaldzka Street 98, 50-357 Wroclaw, Poland
The study justified the intuition that emotional consciousness could occur as an effect of interactions between discrete cognitive processes of availability and accessibility at a global threshold. The relationships between both cognitive processes were investigated by engaging the participants in backward masking tasks with subliminally presented emotional faces. Psychophysical measures of the interactions between both cognitive processes were taken with a threshold model by Krantz. In first experiment, the exclusivity relationship was examined which presumed that there is the threshold beyond which emotional stimulation is strong enough for the participant to gain access to consciousness, but no longer available. There was clear evidence that both cognitive processes were mutually exclusive when emotional target exposure increased. In the second experiment, the independence interaction was tested implicating that both cognitive processes act in concert in producing conscious performance, and therefore there are some proportions of emotional items that are consciously available and consciously accessed. As compare with the “exclusivity” condition, psychophysical measures indicated stronger evidence that emotional consciousness followed the independence interaction. Overall, the study showed that subjects’ performance could be driven by cognitive processes of threshold-like nature, and their interactions could lead to plausible effects in producing conscious behavior during masking.