Hizlari gonbidatua: Miguel Vadillo. Biases and methodological problems in the study of consciousness

What: Biases and methodological problems in research on unconscious mental processes

Where: BCBL Auditorium and Auditorium zoom room (If you would like to attend to this meeting reserve at info@bcbl.eu)

Who: Miguel Vadillo. PhD, Associate Professor, Psicología Básica Department, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid

When:  Thursday,  Feb 20th at 12:00 PM noon.

What’s the role of conscious awareness? Why can’t we just act like robots or zombies? In a nutshell, why is there something it is like to be me… or you? These are possibly some of the deepest and most fascinating questions ever faced by philosophy, psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Empirical evidence collected over the last decade suggests that conscious awareness might be unnecessary for most cognitive processes. To name just a few examples, on a recent survey of experts in consciousness science, more than half of the respondents thought that mental processes like attention, response inhibition, long-term memory, goal-driven behavior and arithmetic could take place unconsciously. It seems tempting to conclude that, after all, conscious awareness plays a very minor role in cognition. In this talk will defend that this negative view is possibly biased by lingering problems in the measurement of consciousness and in the logic followed by most studies on unconscious cognition. When critically assessed, conclusive evidence for unconscious cognition is relatively scarce and open to debate.