 Once the problematic assumption about linearity has been made precise, however, we see that it cannot be satisfactory to credit the entire collapse of the early/late debate to this assumption. The falsity of the assumption about the linearity of the processes supporting personal-level awareness does not undermine the very idea that the early/late debate is a meaningful one. The problems that it creates are largely methodological. The falsity of that assumption means that one cannot make an inference from a lack of personal-level awareness of some content to the absence of representations encoding that content. It also means that Broadbent was wrong to suppose that the psychological effects of unattended stimuli can only depend on those properties of which the inattentive perceiver can be aware. But these are methodological problems. They do not, by themselves, imply that the debate between the early selection theory and the late selection theory must have been misconceived.