Philip M. Merikle is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo, Canada.
Merikle's work sought to shift the debate from indirect-without-direct effects determined by Holender to be the only way unconscious perception could be proved, to what he defined as objective (forced chance level) and subjective thresholds (a threshold of claimed awareness) as a means to distinguish stimuli presentation.
[22] More recently, Merikle has published a number of studies which measure effects of stimuli and understanding below subjective threshold.
This is the point at which observers claim to be unable to determine whether or not they are detecting perceptual stimuli and information at a better than chance level.
"[23] In other words, Reingold and Merikle argued that it is impossible for indirect measures to provide a more comprehensive understanding of relevant perceptual information than for direct measures such as indirect discriminations are always less than or equally sensitive to relevant perceptual information to direct discriminations.