Theory and Practice of Awareness Measurement in Experimental Cognitive Research

Measurement of consciousness is one of the key methodological problems of cognitive experiments. The choice of method is often made without reference to a specific theory or the explication of the underlying assumptions about the nature of the phenomenon being measured. It is suggested that the lack of theoretical justification of the employed methods leads to unconstructive criticism and disagreement among researchers. We discussed the most common awareness measures in research on learning, memory, perception, and the underlying assumptions about the nature of consciousness and their relationship to theories of consciousness. The degree of theoretical justification of consciousness measures was assessed in a sample of 179 experimental articles. It was shown that in only a quarter of cases, the researchers linked the methods with corresponding assumptions about the nature of consciousness. In the rest of the cases, the choice of method was not theoretically justified.