Integration Without Awareness

Abstract

Human conscious awareness is commonly seen as the climax of evolution. However, what function-if any-it serves in human behavior is still debated. One of the leading suggestions is that the cardinal function of conscious awareness is to integrate numerous inputs-including the multitude of features and objects in a complex scene-across different levels of analysis into a unified, coherent, and meaningful perceptual experience. Here we demonstrate, however, that integration of objects with their background scenes can be achieved without awareness of either. We used a binocular rivalry technique known as continuous flash suppression to induce perceptual suppression in a group of human observers. Complex scenes that included incongruent objects escaped perceptual suppression faster than normal scenes did. We conclude that visual awareness is not needed for object-background integration or for processing the likelihood of an object to appear within a given semantic context, but may be needed for dealing with novel situations.

Breaking continuous flash suppression: competing for consciousness on the pre-semantic battlefield

“…This finding demonstrates that the meaning of words is indeed extracted and integrated non-consciously. Along the same lines, Mudrik et al (2011) showed that scenes containing incongruent objects (e.g., Michael Jordan holding a watermelon) broke through suppression faster than the same scenes containing congruent objects (e.g., Michael Jordan holding a basketball). The authors stress that dissociating a coherent from an incoherent image requires the integration of an object in its semantic context; a process originally thought to require consciousness (e.g., Edelman and Tononi, 2000).…”

“…Consequently, these studies do not attribute their findings to high level processing under continuous flash suppression. Importantly, three out of four b-CFS experiments that led the authors to conclude from their data that the observed difference in suppression durations was caused by semantic or conceptual analysis of the stimuli under CFS, however, did not include such a control condition (i.e., Costello et al, 2009; Mudrik et al, 2011; Sklar et al, 2012). Thus far, the only study that convincingly demonstrates high-level competition in a b-CFS experiment, is that of Yang and Yeh (2011).…”

Sustained invisibility through crowding and continuous flash suppression: a comparative review

“…4As in for what we noted regarding face processing, much more evidence of semantic processing was obtained using bCFS (Jiang et al, 2007; Costello et al, 2009; Mudrik et al, 2011; Yang and Yeh, 2011; Sklar et al, 2012). …”

Unconscious processing under interocular suppression: getting the right measure

“…A rapidly growing body of literature using b-CFS now suggests that interocular suppression allows for a much greater extent of high-level unconscious processing than previously thought (for a review, see Gayet et al, submitted). For example, b-CFS is sensitive to various features of face stimuli (Jiang et al, 2007; Yang et al, 2007; Zhou et al, 2010; Stein et al, 2011b,c, 2012b, 2014; Chen and Yeh, 2012; Stein and Sterzer, 2012; Stewart et al, 2012; Gobbini et al, 2013a,b), and can even be influenced by semantic stimulus properties (Costello et al, 2009; Mudrik et al, 2011; Sklar et al, 2012). These findings demonstrate that b-CFS is highly sensitive to differences between complex stimuli in their potency to gain access to awareness.…”