Can we detect regularities in our environment and adapt behavior accordingly in the absence of awareness? The demonstration of unconscious (implicit) cognition hinges on participants’ unawareness of stimuli, processes, or products involved in a task. The gold standard is to establish an indirect-without-direct effect, that is, an uninstructed effect of a stimulus on behavior under conditions that preclude any effect of the stimulus on a response according to explicit instructions. This symposium will bring together researchers working on new methods tailored to investigate the possibility of indirect-without-direct effects. The first two talks will present novel indirect and direct
measures for well-known experimental paradigms. Sascha Meyen will demonstrate a new test of reaction-time differences, which offers an improved indirect measure and provides evidence against unconscious processing in contextual cueing. In the area of priming, Thomas Schmidt will talk about a new theory of visibility focusing on the critical stimulus feature that generates the indirect effect and must be assessed in the direct measure. The final three talks will present new analyses for data that presumably show an indirect-without-direct pattern. These data often suffer from regression to the mean (RttM), defined as the statistical phenomenon that makes natural variation in repeated data look like real change. When direct measures are contaminated with measurement error, low awareness scores will tend to be followed by awareness scores closer to the mean. Itay Yaron will outline a solution to the RttM problem that uses a widely applicable bootstrapping algorithm based only on a small set of assumptions. Simone Malejka will present a method of true-score estimation based on the Bayesian principle of shrinkage, which corrects noisy data and can solve RttM and related measurement biases. Lastly, Zoltan Dienes will demonstrate how Bayes factors can provide evidence for (or against) one’s theory in the presence of measurement error by testing an interval null hypothesis of zero awareness in post-hoc trial selection.