Temporal structure coding with and without awareness

Abstract

a b s t r a c tIn order to interpret a constantly changing environment, visual events far apart in space and time must be integrated into a unified percept. While spatial properties of invisible signals are known to be encoded without awareness, the fate of temporal properties remains largely unknown. Here, we probed temporal integration for two distinct motion stimuli that were either visible or rendered invisible using continuous flash suppression. We found that when invisible, both the direction of apparent motion and the gender of point-light walkers were processed only when defined across short time periods (i.e., respectively 100 ms and 1000 ms). This limitation was not observed under full visibility. These similar findings at two different hierarchical levels of processing suggest that temporal integration windows shrink in the absence of perceptual awareness. We discuss this phenomenon as a key prediction of the global neuronal workspace and the information integration theories of consciousness.

Real-Life Continuous Flash Suppression - Rendering The Real World Unconscious Using Augmented Reality Goggles

“…Thus, the literature seems to be divided about the scope of unconscious processing of information under CFS. Notwithstanding these controversies, the methodology itself has proved to be highly fruitful in consciousness studies, and opened the gate to new lines of research and new types of questions which necessitate longer-duration stimuli (e.g., studying temporal intergration; Faivre & Koch, 2014;or causality;Moors, Wagemans, & de-Wit, 2017) .…”

Enhanced discriminability for nonbiological motion violating the two-thirds power law

“…Previous work on biological motion perception has shown that many aspects can be processed relatively automatically (Johansson, 1973;Mather et al, 1992), and others have suggested the involvement of higher level processing requiring attention (Thornton et al, 2002;Thornton & Vuong, 2004). A previous study using point-light walkers masked by CFS found that kinematic but not structural information of biological motion was processed in the absence of awareness (Faivre & Koch, 2014). The current results show that across all three experiments stimuli following nonbiological motion trajectories were discriminated faster both for masked stimuli as well as for unmasked stimuli.…”

“…Furthermore, although humans show a high sensitivity to perception of biological motion (Ahlstr} om, Blake, & Ahlstr} om, 1997;Johansson, 1973), which develops early in infancy and is thought to rely on low-level mechanisms (Mather, Radford, & West, 1992;Simion et al, 2008), it is yet under debate if biological motion perception is preattentive or postattentive (Thompson & Parasuraman, 2012;Thornton, Rensink, & Shiffrar, 2002;Thornton & Vuong, 2004). Previous work has shown that dynamic facial expressions (Faivre, Charron, Roux, Lehéricy, & Kouider, 2012), translational and rotational motion (Kaunitz, Fracasso, Lingnau, & Melcher, 2013), or biological motion (Faivre & Koch, 2014) can be processed unconsciously and thus arguably without explicit attention. This suggests that some processes relating to perception of biological motion may not require attention; however, this has not been investigated for fundamental kinematic laws such as the two-thirds power law, which would allow addressing this issue without the additional complexities of human figural processing as in point-light displays.…”

Commentary: Definitely maybe: can unconscious processes perform the same functions as conscious processes?

“…New findings extend the previous literature on non-conscious executive function and implicit effects of working memory (Gayet et al, 2013 ; Dutta et al, 2014 ), as well as implicit emotion regulation (Wang and Li, 2017 ). Non-conscious information integration, yet another function that was once perceived as requiring consciousness, was demonstrated in new ways (Alsius and Munhall, 2013 ; Faivre et al, 2014 ; Mudrik et al, 2014 ; Fahrenfort et al, 2017 ; Hung et al, 2017 ; but see Moors et al, 2016 ); various laboratories have shown that information can be non-consciously integrated across time by demonstrating motion perception with subliminal stimuli (Kaunitz et al, 2011 ; Kimura et al, 2012 ; Faivre and Koch, 2014a , b ; Salomon et al, 2016 ; Moors et al, 2017 ); it has been shown that narratives can be extracted from subliminal stimuli (Kawakami and Yoshida, 2015 ); and, relatedly, Moors et al ( 2017 ) have shown that causality is inferred and used non-consciously too (non-casual events become conscious after causal events). Lastly, priming bankers with their banker's identity leads to increased dishonesty (Cohn et al, 2014 ).…”