Illusory brightness priming occurs without awareness

Context-dependent brightness priming occurs without visual awareness.

Our visual systems account for stimulus context in brightness perception, but whether such adjustments occur for stimuli that we are unaware of has not been established. We therefore assessed whether stimulus context influences brightness processing by measuring unconscious priming with metacontrast masking. When a middle-gray disk was presented on a darker (or brighter) background, such that i...

Illusory causation: why it occurs.

Considerable evidence indicates that people overattribute causality to a given stimulus when it is salient or the focus of their attention--the so-called illusory-causation phenomenon. Although illusory causation has proved to be quite robust and generalizable, a compelling explanation for it has not been empirically documented. Four social-attribution studies were conducted to test the hypothe...

Brightness perception, illusory contours, and corticogeniculate feedback.

A neural network model is developed to explain how visual thalamocortical interactions give rise to boundary percepts such as illusory contours and surface percepts such as filled-in brightnesses. Top-down feedback interactions are needed in addition to bottom-up feed-forward interactions to simulate these data. One feedback loop is modeled between lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) and cortical ...

Priming of Anagram Solutions with and without Awareness

Priming illusory words: an ERP approach.

Repetition blindness (RB) was used to investigate whether illusory words emerge at a lexical-perceptual or a semantic-reconstructional level. Illusory words were evoked by the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of two real words and a word fragment. The initial words share the same string of letters ("CREEP"-"SHEEP"), producing a free-floating word fragment ("SH"). This fragment is likely ...