Insights on overflow from failure to report tasks.

Theories of consciousness diverge on the functional requirement that a conscious state need be reportable. Some maintain that the perceptual system's capacity for consciousness exceeds that of its capacity for access. Others contend that what is accessed is all there is to consciousness. Here, we suggest a compelling case for access-free consciousness cannot be made reliant on experimental evidence where access is necessarily invoked. However, a bona fide empirical separation of consciousness and report could counter the claim that reportability, and hence access, is all there is to consciousness. We first overview recent neurophysiological findings from no-report tasks, before examining a series of studies in which participants were unable to report features of clearly visible items. These new data present a challenge for a hard "access-only" view of consciousness, as they appear to demonstrate that properties of our visual experience can remain unreportable. In so doing, we highlight the utility and underappreciated value of so-called failure to report tasks.

Searching for emotion: A top-down set governs attentional orienting to facial expressions.

Research indicates that humans orient attention toward facial expressions of emotion. Orienting to facial expressions has typically been conceptualised as due to bottom-up attentional capture. However, this overlooks the contributions of top-down attention and selection history. In the present study, across four experiments, these three attentional processes were differentiated using a variation of the dot-probe task, in which participants were cued to attend to a happy or angry face on each trial. Results show that attention toward facial expressions was not exclusively driven by bottom-up attentional capture; instead, participants could shift their attention toward both happy and angry faces in a top-down manner. This effect was not found when the faces were inverted, indicating that top-down attention relies on holistic processing of the face. In addition, no evidence of selection history was found (i.e., no improvement on repeated trials or blocks of trials in which the task was to orient to the same expression). Altogether, these results suggest that humans can use top-down attentional control to rapidly orient attention to emotional faces.