# Unconscious perception and phenomenal coherence JAKE QUILTY-DUNN **Opening (not a real abstract):** Long thought to be a contradiction in terms, the existence of unconscious perception became orthodoxy in cognitive science in the latter half of the 20th century. Recently, theorists such as Hakwan Lau, Megan Peters and Ian Phillips have argued that this orthodoxy may be mistaken. Evidence for unconscious perception typically involves above-chance performance on a task that requires sensitivity to some stimulus accompanied by failure to report perceiving the stimulus (e.g. Marshall and Halligan 1988 and Luck et al. 1996). The recent bevy of critics have raised two problems with this form of evidence. The first is known as the ‘criterion problem’ – namely, that failures of report may be a result of an overly conservative criterion for report rather than a lack of consciousness. Peters and Lau, for