Behavioral Methods in Consciousness Research

Why are we conscious? How can it be that information processed in the brains of living creatures is accompanied by subjective experience? While such questions have been topics of philosophical debates for centuries, the past decades have seen a surge of scientific interest with the result that the research literature has expanded greatly, particularly in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive science. Interestingly, this scientific work has made use of a wide variety of different methods without much consensus on how one might in fact measure subjective consciousness. This situation makes it potentially impossible to compare and contrast experimental findings, and difficult to show that consciousness research is a discipline going in a particular direction or has a particular focus. This book provides an overview of methods and approaches for studying consciousness. It aims to make progress giving concrete tools for how to investigate consciousness in combination with theoretical discussions of possibilities and limitations of each method