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 Author's personal copy
Opinion
Getting technical about awareness
Colin W.G. Clifford, Ehsan Arabzadeh and Justin A. Harris
School of Psychology, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia
It has recently been argued that post-decision wagering
provides an objective measure of awareness. We criti-
cally evaluate this claim, emphasizing the distinction
between performance without awareness and a reluc-
tance to gamble in full awareness of weak sensory
evidence. We address two key methodological issues.
The first is the design of the pay-off matrix to reward a
strategy of wagering that reflects the strength of sensory
evidence. The second is the use of signal detection
theory to analyze the resulting data. We argue that
proper treatment of these issues is essential if post-
decision wagering is to prove valuable in validating
claims of perception without awareness in normal sub-
jects and neuropsychological patients.
Measuring awareness
How activity in our brains gives rise to conscious aware-
ness is a fundamental question in cognitive science [1]. But
what is awareness, and how can we assess whether or not
someone is aware of something? Researchers have
attempted to answer these questions by investigating
the strength of confidence that subjects have in their
decisions. Following presentation of a stimulus, subjects
are typically required to make two responses: a psycho-
physical judgment about some attribute of the stimulus
and a rating of their confidence in that judgment [2,3].
However, techniques using post-decision confidence rat-
ings have been criticized on methodological grounds [4–6].
A recent report by Persaud and colleagues argues that an
objective measure of awareness is provided instead by the
technique of post-decision wagering [7]. Following a psy-
chophysical decision, subjects are required to bet on its
correctness by making either a high or a low wager. If the
decision was correct, the subject wins the amount wagered;
otherwise they lose that amount. Subjects thus have the
opportunity to convert their psychophysical performance
into financial profit.
Post-decision wagering
The potential novelty of the approach proposed by Persaud
and colleagues lies in the use of wagers rather than sub-
jective confidence measures. The rationale for using wager-
ing is that it ‘exploits people’s desire to make money’ [8]
and that ‘participants find post-decision wagering to be
more intuitive than were subjective measures’ [7]. Persaud
and colleagues claimed that failure to maximize earnings
on a post-decision wager demonstrates that decisions are
made without awareness. Here, we challenge this claim on
theoretical grounds using signal detection theory [9].
We demonstrate, through the behavior of a hypothetical
Corresponding author: Clifford, C.W.G. (colinc@psych.usyd.edu.au).
1364-6613/$ – see front matter ß 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2007.11.009
observer, that the previously proposed analysis of
post-decision wagering fails to distinguish between per-
formance without awareness and a reluctance to gamble on
the basis of full awareness of weak sensory evidence. To
remedy this flaw, we propose two fundamental changes
that are essential if post-decision wagering is to provide an
objective measure of awareness.
We focus here on the first of the three tasks described by
Persaud and colleagues, involving decisions about the
presence or absence of a stimulus that was in fact present
in 50% of trials. The data we have reanalyzed come from
patient GY, who consistently shows blindsight, a paradox-
ical dissociation between discrimination and awareness of
visual stimuli following damage to striate cortex (see, e.g.,
Ref. [10]). We do not wish to claim that GY does not exhibit
blindsight, although it is interesting to note that the Yes–
No task with which Persaud and colleagues claim to
demonstrate perception without awareness in GY is pre-
cisely the type of judgment on which GY has previously
been shown to be impaired relative to his performance on a
forced-choice task [11]. What we are disputing is the claim
by Persaud and colleagues that the analysis of post-
decision wagering ‘measures awareness directly’.
Consider the summary data of Persaud and colleagues
presented in Table 1. It is evident that their subject did not
consistently wager high after correct decisions: of 141
correct trials, he wagered high on only 48% (67/141). He
thus failed to earn as much as if he had wagered high after
all correct trials. On the basis of this failure to maximize
winnings, Persaud and colleagues concluded that these
data demonstrate perception without awareness. If that
conclusion was logically sound, we reasoned, it should be
impossible for the reported pattern of results to have arisen
from a situation in which GY based the magnitude of his
post-decision wager on knowledge of the same sensory
evidence upon which the Yes–No decision had been based.
Testing awareness with a hypothetical observer
We designed a hypothetical observer using the following
simple strategy for making each decision and subsequent
wager. For the decision, if the weight of sensory evidence
exceeds a certain threshold then the observer responds ‘Yes’,
otherwise ‘No’. For the wager, the observer bets high follow-
ing a ‘Yes’ only if the weight of sensory evidence exceeds a
greater (more conservative) criterion level. Following a ‘No’,
the observer bets high only if the weight of sensory evidence
fails even to reach a lower (more liberal) criterion. The Yes–
No decision and the subsequent wager are thus based upon
knowledge of the same sensory evidence.
For ease of exposition we will consider a single case in
which the observer is much more likely to wager high
on ‘Yes’ decisions than on ‘No’ decisions, reflecting the
54
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Opinion Trends in Cognitive Sciences Vol.12 No.2

Table 1. Number of high and low wagers made by subject GY as plausible bias of an observer to place more weight on
a function of the correctness of the preceding detection the presence than absence of evidence. We also make
judgment the assumption, conventional in signal detection theory
Correct Incorrect Total wagers
(see Box 1), that the weight of sensory evidence for the
High wager 67 23 90
Low wager 74 36 110
presence of the target signal is given by the strength of
Total responses 141 59 200 the signal corrupted by additive Gaussian noise, whereas
Data reproduced from Ref. [7]. the evidence on target-absent trials is given simply by the

Box 1. Signal detection theory

Signal detection theory assumes that, in a Yes–No detection task, an
observer will respond positively when the sensory evidence for the
presence of the target stimulus exceeds a criterion level set by the
observer. For a target stimulus of given strength, the responses of the
observer can be described by a single operating characteristic
specifying the degree of overlap between the signal-plus-noise and
noise-only distributions (Figure Ia). Signal detection theory enables
us to quantify the subjective strength of the stimulus according to the
metric d0 [9], which is computed from the hit rate and false alarm rate
of the observer. The hit rate is the proportion of target-present trials
on which the observer responds ‘Yes’; the false alarm rate is the
proportion of target-absent trials on which the observer responds
‘Yes’. The subjective strength of the stimulus determines the shape of
the operating characteristic (Figure Ib), whereas variations in criterion
level determine the location on that operating characteristic (Figure
Ic).
The accuracy of responding of a subject, in terms of the overall
proportion of correct responses, depends not only on the subjective
signal strength but also on the response criterion (Figure Id,e). Thus, it
is unsafe to make inferences about subjective signal strength on the
basis of accuracy. Post-decision wagering rewards accuracy, because
it does not discriminate between hits and correct rejections (correct
decisions) or between misses and false alarms (incorrect decisions).
Thus, it is unsafe to make inferences about the availability of sensory
evidence to awareness purely on the basis of the accuracy of post-
decision wagering.

Figure I. Subjective signal strength, bias and accuracy. (a) Subjective signal strength, d0 , is a measure of the separation of the probability distributions of sensory
evidence on target-present and target-absent trials. (b) For a given d0 , the hit rate and false alarm rate of the observer lie on the corresponding operating characteristic at
a point determined by the decision criterion of the observer. Each of the operating characteristics illustrated corresponds to a particular d0 ; sensitivity increases with
deviation from the major diagonal. (c) The decision criterion quantifies the weight of sensory evidence that the observer requires to report that the target was present.
Each of the isobias curves illustrated corresponds to a single criterion (as applied across the sensitivity continuum). (d) The accuracy of an observer in terms of the
proportion of correct responses is the average of the hit rate and the correct rejection rate (1 – false alarm rate). Each of the isoperformance lines illustrated corresponds
to a particular accuracy; accuracy increases with deviation from the major diagonal. (e) Accuracy depends not only on subjective signal strength but also on response
criterion. Thus, the same accuracy can result from different subjective signal strengths, depending on the response criterion. Similarly, different accuracies can result
from the same subjective signal strength.

55
 Author's personal copy
Opinion
Figure 1. Different criteria for responding and wagering. Signal-plus-noise (red) and noise-only (black) probability distributions of sensory evidence on target-present and
target-absent trials, respectively. The degree of overlap between these distributions determines the operating characteristic of the observer, quantified in terms of d0 .
Vertical lines denote decision (green) and wagering (blue) criteria for a hypothetical observer (Table 2) designed to reproduce the performance levels reported by Persaud
and colleagues (Table 1). Each wager is based upon the same sensory evidence as the preceding decision and differs only in criterion level. Units along the horizontal axis
are standard deviations of the noise distribution.
same Gaussian noise distribution (Figure 1). It is
important to note that our conclusions do not depend on
either of these assumptions, which in fact serve only to
limit the range of possible scenarios that might give rise to
the pattern of results reported by Persaud and colleagues.
Table 2 shows the responses of our hypothetical obser-
ver to 200 psychophysical trials, half of which contain the
target signal and half of which do not. For the Yes–No
decision, the hit rate is the proportion of target-present
trials on which the observer correctly reports the target,
and the false alarm rate is the proportion of target-absent
trials on which the observer erroneously responds ‘yes’.
Together, the hit rate and false alarm rate provide a
measure of subjective signal strength, d0 , the separation
of the probability distributions of sensory evidence on
target-present and target-absent trials (see Box 1). For
our hypothetical observer, the hit rate is 75% (63 high
wagers and 12 low wagers following a ‘Yes’ on 100 target-
present trials) and the false alarm rate is 34% (23 high
wagers and 11 low wagers following a ‘Yes’ on 100 target-
absent trials), corresponding to a d0 of 1.09. We can treat
the boundary between low and high wagers following a
‘Yes’ response in the same way. In this case the hit rate is
63% (63 high wagers following a ‘Yes’ on 100 target-present
trials) and the false alarm rate is 23% (23 high wagers
following a ‘Yes’ on 100 target-absent trials), corresponding
to a d0 of 1.07. Thus, it can be seen that our hypothetical
observer is basing the decision and subsequent wager on
the same weight of sensory evidence (d0 = 1.08  0.01), the
only difference being the more conservative criterion for
wagering high than for responding ‘Yes’. The boundary
between low and high wagers following a ‘No’ is also
Table 2. Responses of a hypothetical observer
Decision No Yes Total
Wager High Low Low High
Target present 0 25 12 63 100
Target absent 4 62 11 23 100
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Trends in Cognitive Sciences Vol.12 No.2
consistent with a d0 of 1.08: for a correct rejection rate of
4% the expected number of misses on 100 target-present
trials would be zero (0.23%).
If we express these data in the form used for the analysis
proposed by Persaud and colleagues [7] then we record 67
(4 + 63) high wagers following correct responses, 23
(0 + 23) high wagers following incorrect responses, 74
(62 + 12) low wagers following correct responses, and 36
(25 + 11) low wagers following incorrect responses. This is
exactly the pattern of responding from which they con-
cluded that GY was not always aware that he was making
correct decisions. That our hypothetical observer performs
in exactly this way demonstrates that the dissociation
between performance and wagering reported by Persaud
and colleagues does not necessarily indicate a lack of
awareness of the sensory evidence upon which perform-
ance is based (see Box 2).
Interpretation of post-decision judgments
The optimal strategy for wagering in the experiments
described by Persaud and colleagues is actually to wager
high regardless of the weight of the sensory evidence. This
is because equal amounts stand to be won and lost on any
given wager. If the observer is performing at chance then it
does not matter whether they bet high or low, their
expected gain is zero. However, the expected gain for
any performance above chance is proportional to the
amount wagered. Thus, the best strategy of the observer
for maximizing expected gain is always to wager high
regardless of the weight of the sensory evidence. This begs
the question: how can a failure of a subject to wager
optimally be a measure of lack of awareness of the sensory
evidence when the optimal strategy is independent of that
evidence? Instead, it demonstrates that the subject lacks
awareness of the optimal strategy for wagering. This ques-
tions the rationale for using wagering instead of confidence
measures because it suggests that wagering might not
be as intuitive as its proponents claim. Of course, if the
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Opinion Trends in Cognitive Sciences Vol.12 No.2

Box 2. Comparison between the blind and normal visual
fields of subject GY
Persaud and colleagues dismiss the possibility that failure of GY to
optimize his winnings could reflect a reluctance to gamble in full
awareness of weak sensory evidence. They claim instead that this is
an instance of perception without awareness, and that his wagering
follows a qualitatively different pattern when he is aware of the
stimuli. For a comparison between wagering in the presence and
absence of awareness to be meaningful, it is essential that the
subjective strength of the sensory evidence be equated between the
two conditions. GY has a unilateral lesion in his left striate cortex,
resulting in a unilateral visual deficit, right homonymous hemi-
anopia. It has previously been demonstrated that the residual vision
in the hemianopia of GY is not like normal, near-threshold vision,
but instead shows a dissociation between performance and
awareness [11]. An appropriate way to equate the subjective
strength of sensory evidence in the presence and absence of
awareness would thus be to equate performance (d0 ) in the normal
and blind visual fields by using a low-contrast stimulus near to
detection threshold in the normal visual field. However, Persaud and
colleagues chose instead to equalize overall performance across a
block of trials by manipulating the proportion of intermixed
extremely easy (96% stimulus contrast) and extremely hard (1%
stimulus contrast) trials. Given that wagers are made on a trial-by-
trial basis, the overall performance level across a block of
intermixed extremely easy and extremely hard stimuli is not a
suitable metric to equate with performance on the original
experiment. On no trial in the control experiment was the subjective
strength of the sensory evidence equal to that in the original
experiment, where sensory evidence was consistently present but
weak. This failure to equate subjective signal strength in a
satisfactory manner undermines the argument by Persaud and
colleagues that the wagering of GY follows qualitatively different
patterns depending on whether or not he is aware of the stimuli.
Instead, their results are entirely consistent with a wagering strategy
whereby the subject makes a high wager only when the sensory
evidence exceeds a certain threshold.
observer believes they have made the wrong decision
then they should wager low. But this only begs another
question: why would an observer make a decision that
they believe is wrong when they only win on correct
decisions?
Table 3. Example pay-off matrix designed to make the optimal
strategy for post-decision gambling a function of the weight of
sensory evidence
Outcome of decision
Correct Incorrect
Wager Low +2 1
High +5 5
Making the optimal wagering strategy depend on the
sensory evidence
If post-decision wagering is to prove useful as a measure of
awareness, it is essential to make the optimal strategy for
gambling a function of the weight of sensory evidence. To
reward a strategy of wagering low when the sensory evi-
dence is weak but wagering high if the evidence is strong,
the ratio of potential gain-to-loss should be greater for low
wagers than for high. This can be achieved by employing a
pay-off matrix such as the one illustrated in Table 3.
In this specific example, when perceptual performance
is at chance (probability that the response is correct = 50%)
the expected return from a low wager is +1/2 [= (+2 1)/2]
compared with 0 from a high wager [=(+5 5)/2]. But when
perceptual performance is perfect (probability that the
response is correct = 100%) a low wager returns only +2
compared with +5 from a high wager. The optimal wager-
ing strategy is determined by the differential loss of wager-
ing incorrectly (5 1 = 4) and the differential gain of
wagering correctly (5 2 = 3) between high and low
wagers. Specifically, the optimal strategy is to wager low
on trials where the weight of sensory evidence is such that
the probability of a correct response is less than the
differential loss of wagering incorrectly divided by the
sum of the differential loss and the differential gain. In
this example, the optimal strategy is to wager low on trials
where the probability of a correct response is less than four-
sevenths and to wager high with stronger evidence. When
the probability of a correct response is exactly four-
sevenths it can be confirmed that the expected return from
low and high wagers is equal (at +5/7).

Figure 2. Distinguishing wagers made with and without awareness. (a) The intersections of the optimal boundary between high and low wagers (curved dotted lines) and
the operating characteristic of the observer (unbroken line) define the optimal strategy of the observer for post-decision wagering (red dots). The blue dot marks the
decision boundary producing optimal accuracy on the Yes-No task. (b) Wagers made with full awareness of the sensory evidence upon which the original decision was
based lie on the sensory operating characteristic even if the strategy for wagering is suboptimal. (c) Wagers made with no awareness of the sensory evidence lie on a line
defined by the ratio of hits to false alarms following a ‘Yes’ decision and on a line defined by the ratio of misses to correct rejections following a ‘No’. The question of
interest then becomes whether the resulting data plotted as hit rate versus false alarm rate are significantly better fitted by a pair of straight lines passing through (0, 0) and
(1, 1), respectively, or by a conventional receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. A significant result would support the hypothesis that post-decision wagering was
being carried out without full access to the sensory evidence upon which the original decision had been made. Red arrows indicate departures from optimal wagering.

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Opinion Trends in Cognitive Sciences Vol.12 No.2

Distinguishing suboptimal wagering from lack of
awareness
The example shows that even a simple pay-off matrix can
lead to an optimal wagering strategy that would be hard for
a subject to operationalize. This highlights that a depar-
ture from advantageous wagering does not necessarily
indicate lack of awareness of the sensory evidence. Here,
we propose an analysis of the wagering data that avoids
confounding lack of awareness of the optimal wagering
strategy with lack of awareness of the weight of sensory
evidence. The key point is that post-decision wagers made
with knowledge of the sensory evidence should still lie on
the same operating characteristic as the original decision
even if the wagering strategy is suboptimal (Figure 2). By
contrast, post-decision wagers made without awareness of
the sensory evidence should be made on the same pro-
portion of hits-to-misses as the original decision. In the
latter case, the wagering of the subject would be as though
they were randomly wagering high after a certain pro-
portion of ‘Yes’ decisions and a certain (possibly different)
proportion of ‘No’ decisions irrespective of the weight of
sensory evidence upon which the decision had been based.
Concluding remarks
We have argued that if post-decision wagering is to prove
valuable then proper treatment of two specific issues is
essential. The first is the design of the pay-off matrix,
which must ensure that the optimal strategy for wagering
is a function of the weight of sensory evidence. The second
is the analysis of the resulting data, which must have the
capacity to distinguish the use of a suboptimal wagering
strategy from a genuine lack of awareness of the sensory
evidence. We have shown here how the original technique
of post-decision wagering as proposed by Persaud and
colleagues [7] can be modified to fulfill these criteria. It
remains to be tested empirically whether there is an
advantage in using post-decision wagering rather than
confidence judgments to validate claims of perception with-
out awareness.
Acknowledgements
This work is supported by Discovery Project Grants to C.C. and J.H. from
the Australian Research Council and a Human Frontiers Science
Programme Long-Term Fellowship to E.A.
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