On 2014 Feb 12, Jacob Jolij commented:

This is an interesting and valuable contribution to the TMS-induced blindsight literature. Several studies thus far have claimed to find TMS-induced blindsight, or the ability to respond to visual stimuli that are suppressed from consciousness by stimulating the early visual cortex with TMS. The authors of this paper argue that in order to truly demonstrate unconscious processing, researchers should use bias-free measures of awareness, such as d'. I support this idea. In their discussion, the authors criticize several earlier studies that have not used such measures, including our demonstration of affective blindsight (Jolij J, 2005).

I would like to note that we did report d' in our paper, albeit in the supplementary information. Detection sensitivity as measured with d' did drop to 0, whilst emotion discrimination sensitivity d' remained at 1.5 in the critical condition, where we presented stimuli for 16.7 ms. We therefore feel that the authors' (implicit) conclusion that our study did not provide sufficient evidence of unconscious processing because no bias-free measure was used is unwarranted.

Interestingly, when inspecting the d'-analyses of our work I did notice that d'-values were above 0 for the 32 ms presentation time in our paper. I can therefore not exclude the possibility that there was 'weak conscious processing' in this condition. However, this would only strengthen the conclusion of our study: we claim that conscious processing block access to unconsciously processed information, something that has been found in other domains as well.

On 2014 Feb 12, Jacob Jolij commented:

This is an interesting and valuable contribution to the TMS-induced blindsight literature. Several studies thus far have claimed to find TMS-induced blindsight, or the ability to respond to visual stimuli that are suppressed from consciousness by stimulating the early visual cortex with TMS. The authors of this paper argue that in order to truly demonstrate unconscious processing, researchers should use bias-free measures of awareness, such as d'. I support this idea. In their discussion, the authors criticize several earlier studies that have not used such measures, including our demonstration of affective blindsight (Jolij J, 2005).

I would like to note that we did report d' in our paper, albeit in the supplementary information. Detection sensitivity as measured with d' did drop to 0, whilst emotion discrimination sensitivity d' remained at 1.5 in the critical condition, where we presented stimuli for 16.7 ms. We therefore feel that the authors' (implicit) conclusion that our study did not provide sufficient evidence of unconscious processing because no bias-free measure was used is unwarranted.

Interestingly, when inspecting the d'-analyses of our work I did notice that d'-values were above 0 for the 32 ms presentation time in our paper. I can therefore not exclude the possibility that there was 'weak conscious processing' in this condition. However, this would only strengthen the conclusion of our study: we claim that conscious processing block access to unconsciously processed information, something that has been found in other domains as well.