Previous research has shown implicit semantic processing of faces or pictures, but whether symbolic carriers such as words can be processed this way remains controversial. Here we examine this issue by adopting the continuous flash suppression paradigm to ensure that the processing undergone is indeed unconscious without the involvement of partial awareness. Negative or neutral words projected into one eye were made invisible due to strong suppression induced by dynamic-noise patterns shown in the other eye through binocular rivalry. Inverted and (...) scrambled words were used as controls to provide baselines at orthographic and feature levels, respectively. Compared to neutral words, emotion-described and emotion-induced negative words required longer time to release from suppression, but only for upright words. These results suggest that words can be processed unconsciously up to semantic level since under interocular suppression completely invisible words can lead to different processing speed due to the emotion information they carry. (shrink)

This study examines whether human gaze lacking the confounding factor of eye whites can be processed unconsciously and explores the critical aspects for such process. Utilizing the continuous flash suppression paradigm, a schematic face—with direct or averted gaze, and with neutral, fearful or happy expressions—was presented to one eye while dynamic masks rendered it invisible to the other eye. Schematic faces were used to avoid unwanted influence from salient eye whites. Participants’ detection time of anything other than the masks was (...) used as an index of unconscious processing time. Faster detection was found for faces with direct gaze than those with averted gaze. However, there was no difference between detection times for different facial expressions and upright-face, inverted-face, and eyes-only conditions . These results confirm that, with schematic faces, gaze can be processed unconsciously regardless of facial expression, and eyes alone are sufficient for such process. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 2, February 2022.

According to the spreading hypothesis of object-based attention, a subliminal cue that can successfully capture attention to a location within an object should also cause attention to spread throughout the whole cued object and lead to the same-object advantage. Instead, we propose that a subliminal cue favors shifts of attention between objects and strengthens the between-object link, which is coded primarily within the dorsal pathway that governs the visual guidance of action. By adopting the two-rectangle method and using an effective (...) subliminal cue to compare with the classic suprathreshold cue, we found a different result pattern with suprathreshold cues than with subliminal cues. The suprathreshold cue replicated the conventional location and object effects, whereas a subliminal cue led to a different-object advantage with a facilitatory location effect and a same-object advantage with an inhibitory location effect. These results support our consciousness-dependent shifting hypothesis but not the spreading hypothesis. (shrink)

Bistable figures provide a fascinating window through which to explore human visual awareness. Here we demonstrate for the first time that the semantic context provided by a background auditory soundtrack can modulate an observer’s predominant percept while watching the bistable “my wife or my mother-in-law” figure . The possibility of a response-bias account—that participants simply reported the percept that happened to be congruent with the soundtrack that they were listening to—was excluded in Experiment 2. We further demonstrate that this crossmodal (...) semantic effect was additive with the manipulation of participants’ visual fixation , while it interacted with participants’ voluntary attention . These results indicate that audiovisual semantic congruency constrains the visual processing that gives rise to the conscious perception of bistable visual figures. Crossmodal semantic context therefore provides an important mechanism contributing to the emergence of visual awareness. (shrink)

Pylyshyn's effort in establishing the cognitive impenetrability of early vision is welcome. However, his view about the role of attention in early vision seems to be oversimplified. The allocation of focal attention manifests its effect among multiple stages in the early vision system, it is not just confined to the input and the output levels.

Expertise in Chinese character recognition is marked by reduced holistic processing, which depends mainly on writing rather than reading experience. Here we show that, while simplified and traditional Chinese readers demonstrated a similar level of HP when processing characters shared between the simplified and traditional scripts, simplified Chinese readers were less holistic than traditional Chinese readers in perceiving simplified characters; this effect depended mainly on their writing rather than reading performance. However, the two groups did not differ in HP of (...) traditional characters, regardless of their difference in reading and writing performances. Our image analysis showed high visual similarity between the two character types, with a larger variance among simplified characters; this may allow simplified Chinese readers to interpolate and generalize their skills to traditional characters. Thus, transfer of perceptual expertise may be constrained by both the similarity in feature and the difference in exemplar variance between the categories. (shrink)

Consciousness researchers are interested in distinguishing between mental activity that occurs with and without awareness . The inattentional blindness paradigm is an excellent tool for this question because it permits the independent manipulation of processing time and awareness. In the present study, we show that implicit texture segregation can occur during inattentional blindness, provided that the texture is exposed for a sufficient duration. In contrast, a Simon effect does not occur during inattentional blindness, even with similar exposure duration of the (...) critical stimulus. This reveals a dissociation between processing time and awareness, consistent with the possibility of separate processing streams for explicit and implicit visual perception. (shrink)

Studies showing human behavior influenced by subliminal stimuli mainly focus on implicit processing per se, and little is known about its interaction with explicit processing. We examined this by using the Simon effect, wherein a task-irrelevant spatial distracter interferes with lateralized response. Lo and Yeh found that the visual Simon effect, although it occurred when participants were aware of the visual distracters, did not occur with subliminal visual distracters. We used the same paradigm and examined whether subliminal and supra-threshold stimuli (...) are processed independently by adding a supra-threshold auditory distracter to ascertain whether it would interact with the subliminal visual distracter. Results showed auditory Simon effect, but there was still no visual Simon effect, indicating that supra-threshold and subliminal stimuli are processed separately in independent streams. In contrast to the traditional view that implicit processing precedes explicit processing, our results suggest that they operate independently in a parallel fashion. (shrink)