J-Lens can't detect what a subliminal learning teacher is transmitting (in 7B-32B models)

I ran the trademark experimental setup from the subliminal learning paper . I reproduced the subliminal learning effect, but I also found that on a teacher model that's been prompted to imbue its answers with a love for owls, a J-Lens reports that the model is rarely thinking about owls (top-1 at any point in ~1.5% of trials). This is really surprising if we grant that J-Lens looks at something like a "global workspace". The lens is not broken, since it seems to perform well on other tasks. This effect reproduces for multiple similar setups on the same model and with very conservative methodologies for training/applying the lens. This effect reproduces for a similar setup with a model as large/performant as Gemma-4-31B. How exactly to interpret this is a little nuanced. Even if we assume that the global workspace theory holds perfectly, it may be the case that the model doesn't respond to system prompts or achieve the subliminal learning effect by actually "thinking" about its preferences. Moreover, it's entirely possible that J-Lens simply works better on larger/more performant models, in which case stronger claims about the applicability of GWT may be true for, say, Claude. In an