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Seeing the invisible: The scope and limits of unconscious processing in binocular rivalry

Zhicheng Lin¹ and Sheng He¹

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1. University of Minnesota

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Document Type:

Manuscript

Date:

Received 29 August 2008 16:55 UTC; Posted 02 September 2008

Subjects:

Neuroscience

Tags:

• Binocular rivalry
• Continuous flash suppression
• Cortical pathways
• Dorsal pathway
• Magnocellular channel
• Parvocellular channel
• Subcortical pathways
• Ventral pathway
• Aftereffect
• Afterimage
• Amygdala
• Awareness
• Consciousness
• Priming
• V1
• visual cortex
• adaptation
• attention
• emotion

Abstract:

When an image is presented to one eye and a very different image is presented to the corresponding location of the other eye, they compete for conscious representation, such that only one image is visible at a time while the other is suppressed. Called binocular rivalry, this phenomenon and its deviants have been extensively exploited to study the mechanism and neural correlates of consciousness. In this paper, we propose a framework, the unconscious binding hypothesis, to distinguish unconscious processing from conscious processing. According to this framework, the unconscious mind not only encodes individual features but also temporally binds distributed features to give rise to cortical representation, but unlike conscious binding, such unconscious binding is fragile. Under this framework, we review evidence from psychophysical and neuroimaging studies, which suggests that: (1) for invisible low level features, prolonged exposure to visual pattern and simple translational motion can alter the appearance of subsequent visible features (i.e. adaptation); for invisible high level features, although complex spiral motion cannot produce adaptation, nor can objects/words enhance subsequent processing of related stimuli (i.e. priming), images of tools can nevertheless activate the dorsal pathway; and (2) although invisible central cues cannot orient attention, invisible erotic pictures in the periphery can nevertheless guide attention, likely through emotional arousal; reciprocally, the processing of invisible information can be modulated by attention at perceptual and neural levels.

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This document is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

How to cite this document:

Lin, Zhicheng and He, Sheng. Seeing the invisible: The scope and limits of unconscious processing in binocular rivalry. Available from Nature Precedings <http://hdl.handle.net/10101/npre.2008.2246.1> (2008)

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