It is debated which perceptual functions can take place unconsciously and which depend on conscious awareness. Here, we tested whether the meaning of invisible pictures can be processed unconsciously, and whether this would depend on the psychophysical technique used to render these images invisible. We measured whether pictures of animals or objects presented under backward masking or continuous flash suppression could prime the subsequent categorization of target words into animal or non-animal. The backward masking experiment failed to replicate the priming effect reported in two previous studies, despite sufficient statistical power. Similarly, the continuous flash suppression experiment provided no evidence for a priming effect. Thus, our experiments failed to demonstrate unconscious semantic processing of pictures. These results support the emerging view that unconscious processing is rather limited in scope.
With the increased sophistication of AI techniques, the application of these systems has been expanding to ever newer fields. Increasingly, these systems are being used in modeling of human aesthetics and creativity, e.g. how humans create artworks and design products. Our lab has developed one such AI creativity deep learning system that can be used to create artworks in the form of images and videos. In this paper, we describe this system and its use in studying the human visual system and the formation of aesthetic experiences. Specifically, we show how time-based AI created media can be used to explore the nature of the dual-pathway neuro-architecture of the human visual system and how this relates to higher cognitive judgments such as aesthetic experiences that rely on these divergent information streams. We propose a theoretical framework for how the movement within percepts such as video clips, causes the engagement of reflexive attention and a subsequent focus on visual information that are primarily processed via the dorsal stream, thereby modulating aesthetic experiences that rely on information relayed via the ventral stream. We outline our recent study in support of our proposed framework, which serves as the first study that investigates the relationship between the two visual streams and aesthetic experiences.
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