The evolved function of brain, cognitive, and behavioral systems is to allow organisms to attempt to gain control of the social, biological, and physical resources that have covaried with survival and reproductive options during the species’ evolutionary history. The information generated by these resources ranges from stable (e.g., prototypical shape of human face) to unpredictable (e.g., chan...

This study investigates the spatiotemporal dynamics associated with conscious and non-conscious processing of naked and dressed human bodies. To this effect, stimuli of naked men and women with visible primary sexual characteristics, as well as dressed bodies, were presented to 20 heterosexual male and female participants while acquiring high resolution EEG data. The stimuli were either conscio...

By combining binocular suppression technique and a probe detection paradigm, we investigated attentional bias to invisible stimuli and its gender difference in both high trait anxiety (HTA) and low trait anxiety (LTA) individuals. As an attentional cue, happy or fearful face pictures were presented to HTAs and LTAs for 800 ms either consciously or unconsciously (through binocular suppression). ...

In normal listeners, the tonal rules of music guide musical expectancy. In a minority of individuals, known as amusics, the processing of tonality is disordered, which results in severe musical deficits. It has been shown that the tonal rules of music are neurally encoded, but not consciously available in amusics. Previous neurophysiological studies have not explicitly controlled the level of a...

There is debate in cognitive neuroscience whether conscious versus unconscious processing represents a categorical or a quantitative distinction. The purpose of the study was to explore this matter using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We first established objective thresholds of the critical temporal parameters for overt and covert presentations of fear and disgust. Next we appli...

In the double-step paradigm, healthy human participants automatically correct reaching movements when targets are displaced. Motor deficits are prominent in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. In the lone investigation of online motor correction in PD using the double-step task, a recent study found that PD patients performed unconscious adjustments appropriately but seemed impaired for consciou...

Abductive logic programming (ALP) can be used to model reactive, proactive and pre-active thinking in intelligent agents. Reactive thinking assimilates observations of changes in the environment, whereas proactive thinking reduces goals to sub-goals and ultimately to candidate actions. Pre-active thinking generates logical consequences of candidate actions, to help in deciding between the alter...

To isolate neural correlates of conscious perception (NCCs), a standard approach has been to contrast neural activity elicited by identical stimuli of which subjects are aware vs. unaware. Because conscious experience is private, determining whether a stimulus was consciously perceived requires subjective report: e.g., button-presses indicating detection, visibility ratings, verbal reports, etc...

Facing response conflict, subjects try to improve their responses by reducing the influence of the detrimental information which caused the conflict. It was speculated that this adaptation to conflict can only occur when the conflicting information is consciously perceived. In this review we give an overview of the research looking at the possibility of unconscious stimuli to provoke this confl...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE After a stroke, people often attempt to consciously control their motor actions, which, paradoxically, disrupts optimal performance. A learning strategy that minimizes the accrual of explicit knowledge may circumvent attempts to consciously control motor actions, thereby resulting in better performance. The purpose of this study was to examine the implicit learning of a d...