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How can we measure awareness? An overview of current methods

It would be pushing at an open door to state that the study of consciousness is challenging because it attempts to develop an epistemically objective approach to a phenomenon that is ontologically subjective (Searle 1997). How can I objectively have access to what another person thinks or experiences? Can a person him-/herself objectively assess or report what he/she thinks? Does introspection afford privileged access, or is it merely glorified heterophenomenology? And even if introspection were truly reliable, do introspective reports reflect one’s actual phenomenological experience, or merely an interpretation thereof in light of task demands? These challenges, which present themselves in a particularly harsh light when it comes to establishing unconscious information processing, reflect the fact that the study of consciousness requires a solution to the following fundamental—and as yet unsolved—problem: How can we measure consciousness? While there has been substantial progress in measuring the level of awareness (Casali et al. 2013; Sitt et al. 2014), and we have made steady progress delineating the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) (Boly et al. 2013), we do not know of any instrument or method that makes it possible to measure the contents of awareness directly (Seth et al. 2008). Having such an instrument (i.e. a consciousness-meter) would make it possible to establish clear relationships between an external state of affairs, people’s subjective experience of this state of affairs, and their overt behavior. However, neither does such an instrument exists nor can we conceive of any way of building it (though some are trying; Haynes and Rees 2005; Kamitani and Tong 2005; Formisano et al. 2008; Haynes 2009). Thus, today, the best we can do to find out what someone currently experiences is to ask them to produce a report about it. Verbal report is the most direct method we can use to find out if a person is aware of some knowledge. But this, as appealing as it is, is fraught with complexity: people may refrain from or simply be unable to report on vague experiences; reports are typically not obtained at the time the experience occurs; people may be biased in different ways that often interact with each other (see Newell and Shanks, 2014, for a potent list of caveats). Even introspection—first-person data per excellence—has demonstrable limits (Nisbett and Wilson 1977; Johansson et al. 2006; Carruthers 2009). For these reasons, many authors have rejected subjective methods altogether and have