Unconscious perceptual justification*

Are there unconscious perceptual processes?

Blindsight and vision for action seem to be exemplars of unconscious visual processes. However, researchers have recently argued that blindsight is not really a kind of unconscious vision but is rather severely degraded conscious vision. Morten Overgaard and colleagues have recently developed new methods for measuring the visibility of visual stimuli. Studies using these methods show that repor...

Unconscious reward facilitates motion perceptual learning

Unconscious reward facilitates motion perceptual learning Xin Xue, Xiaolin Zhou & Sheng Li a Department of Psychology, Peking University, Beijing, China b Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (Ministry of Education), Peking University, Beijing, China c PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Peking University, Beijing, China d Center for Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, B...

Distinguishing conscious from unconscious perceptual processes.

Unconscious orientation processing depends on perceptual load.

The effects of perceptual load on the level of adaptation to task-irrelevant and invisible oriented gratings were examined. Participants performed a task at fixation under conditions of low (detecting color targets) or high (detecting conjunctions of color and shape) perceptual load. Simultaneously, a task-irrelevant-oriented grating was presented monocularly in a more peripheral location but w...

Non-Attended Representations are Perceptual Rather than Unconscious in Nature

Introspectively we experience a phenomenally rich world. In stark contrast, many studies show that we can only report on the few items that we happen to attend to. So what happens to the unattended objects? Are these consciously processed as our first person perspective would have us believe, or are they - in fact - entirely unconscious? Here, we attempt to resolve this question by investigatin...