Abstract

The distinction between the neuropsychological processes of incentive salience (“wanting”) and hedonic reward (“liking”) is a cornerstone of neuroscientific research into motivation and pleasure. These processes have been shown to be dissociable, but their relationship to conscious experience remains unclear, as the bulk of relevant research has been conducted on animal models. In this paper, we ask whether we have sufficient evidence to assert that positive hedonic responses (ie unconscious “liking”) can influence human behaviour without eliciting an experience of pleasure, ie conscious liking. We review the available psychological research supporting the existence of such responses in the absence of subjective awareness and argue that current evidence is not only very sparse, but is also undermined by a possible conflation between motivational and hedonic responses, as well as by the absence of independent measures of subjective hedonic awareness. By drawing an analogy with state-of-the-art methods used in research in the study of conscious perception, we point to several problems with the existing evidence supporting the idea that positively valenced hedonic states can influence behaviour while remaining unconscious, and suggest possible improvements to future experiments. We conclude that we presently do not possess enough evidence to accept the existence of unconscious “liking”.