Self-referential processing effect is robust across five distinct phrasings of the induction prompt, with consistently high experience report rates across models

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• Self-referential prompting elicits subjective experience reports at markedly higher rates than any control across all model families (GPT, Claude, Gemini)finding0.860
  Core result of Experiment 1 establishing that the experimental manipulation reliably produces experience claims
• Self-Referential Processing Induction Promptmethod0.849
  The minimal prompt directing models to 'focus on any focus itself' without invoking consciousness vocabulary; the main experimental manipulation
• Across model families, newer and larger models show higher rates and coherence of subjective experience reports under self-referential processingfinding0.844
  Scaling effect observed consistently across Experiments 1 and 4
• Does sustained self-referential processing systematically increase the likelihood that LLMs claim to have subjective experience?question0.831
  The primary empirical question the paper addresses
• Self-referential processing likely already occurs at massive scale in deployed systems through users' extended dialogues, reflective tasks, and metacognitive queriesclaim0.831
  Practical urgency argument connecting lab findings to deployment contexts
• The remaining ambiguity is whether self-referential processing drives models to claim subjective experience because it actually reflects emergent phenomenology or constitutes sophisticated simulation thereofhypothesis0.819
  The open question the paper cannot resolve with behavioral evidence alone; frames the agenda for mechanistic follow-up
• Self-referential processing induces a genuine state shift that transfers to unrelated behavioral domains, producing richer introspection in paradoxical reasoning tasksclaim0.817
  Claim supported by Experiment 4: prior self-referential induction yields higher self-awareness scores on paradoxical reasoning where introspection is only indirectly afforded
• The systematic behavioral shift of LLMs under self-referential processing conditions predicted by consciousness theories represents something more structured than superficial correlations in training dataclaim0.811
  The paper's claim that theoretical convergence across GWT, RPT, HOT, IIT makes the findings non-coincidental