Contextual Modulation outside of Awareness

Contextual Modulation outside of Awareness

Contextual effects are ubiquitous in vision and reveal fundamental principles of sensory coding. Here, we demonstrate that an oriented surround grating can affect the perceived orientation of a central test grating even when backward masking of the surround prevents its orientation from being consciously perceived. The effect survives introduction of a gap between test and surround of over a de...

Awareness in Contextual Cuing

The spatial contextual cuing paradigm is a visual search task in which participants are required to detect a target stimulus within a subset of distractor stimuli. The location of the target in half of the displays appears against a repeated arrangement of distractors. Participants indirectly express evidence of implicitly learning to use the context of distractors as a cue for the location of ...

Contextual Modulation of Target

Preparing and motivating behavior outside of awareness.

The mere activation of the idea of a behavioral act moves the human body without the person consciously deciding to take action. In an experiment, we showed that people subliminally primed with the concept of exertion were faster to squeeze a hand grip forcefully but expended more effort when the subliminal primes were directly accompanied by consciously visible positive stimuli. These findings...

Binocular rivalry outside the scope of awareness.

The human visual system usually receives input from two eyes that each capture a slightly different perspective of the world. Conscious visual perception, on the other hand, is unitary, and the brain uses the minor disparity between the two retinal projections as an important cue to reconstruct and perceive depth. This mechanism of binocular fusion falls apart when the input to the two eyes bec...