Perceptual conscious experiences result from non-conscious processes that precede them. We document a new characteristic of the cognitive system: the speed with which visual meaningful stimuli are prioritized to consciousness over competing noise in visual masking paradigms. In ten experiments (N = 399) we find that an individual's non-conscious visual prioritization speed (NVPS) is ubiquitous across a wide variety of stimuli, and generalizes across visual masks, suppression tasks, and time. We also find that variation in NVPS is unique, in that (...) it cannot be explained by variation in general speed, perceptual decision thresholds, short-term visual memory, or three networks of attention (alerting, orienting and executive). Finally, we find that NVPS is correlated with subjective measures of sensitivity, as they are measured by the Highly Sensitive Person scale. We conclude by discussing the implications of variance in NVPS for understanding individual variance in behavior and the neural substrates of consciousness. (shrink)

The baker's transformation is one of the earliest and simplest examples of a bijective mixing transformation. By determining its cycle structure, we show that this transformation is not embeddable in any flow, i.e., one-parameter semigroup, on the nonnegative rationals and,a fortiori, not emdeddable in any flow on the reals.

Recently, P. D. Finch and R. Groblicki determined all bivariate probability densities with specified margins. We point out that their result follows immediately from the complete solution to the problem of determining all n-dimensional cumulative probability distribution functions with specified one-dimensional margins, which was solved by one of us in 1959.