Nicolas Becker

Research interests

At the fringe of conscious perception

  • Which conscious and unconscious processes contribute to facilitate behavioral reactions in semantic and motor priming paradigms?
  • Can these processes be selectively hampered using different masking strategies (metacontrast, crowding, pattern masking)?
  • What happens in the time between prime and mask presentations?

 

At the fringe of conscious memory

  • Does the feeling of familiarity involve an attribution of cognitive ‘fluency’?
  • How do EEG correlates of semantic priming and familiarity relate?

 

As Dennett puts it (2005, p. 134), consciousness can be seen as „cerebral celebrity“. This metaphor gives a hint of where the journey of understanding consciousness might finally lead us. Today, following a stimulus on its career through the neural system still gives rise to plenty of controversy, revolving around questions like 'how does the processing of information differ for conscious and unconscious thought?' And - what do we need consciousness for, anyway?