Unconscious binding between visible and invisible stimuli reveals dissociation between attention and consciousness S-Y Lin, S-L Yeh |
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Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taiwan
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| Does binding lead to consciousness? Previous studies seem to reveal that parts of grouped objects tend to be perceived altogether, suggesting that consciousness, similar to object-based attention, emerges for the grouped object instead of accesses its parts differentially. If so, binding between visible and invisible stimuli may result in the bounded object being visible. We combined the double-rectangle cueing paradigm with the continuous flash suppression paradigm to render the corners of the two rectangles visible and the rest of them invisible when they were presented dichoptically. Same-object advantage—target shown on the cued object was judged as appearing earlier than the other concurrent target on the uncued object—was found in a temporal-order judgment task. That is, binding between visible and invisible stimuli occurred. However, the invisible part did not become visible despite the presence of object-based attention (Experiment 1). Such binding also occurred for groupings defined by semantic relations (Experiment 2). These results suggest that perceptual and semantic binding can occur unconsciously and demonstrate a dissociation of processing between consciousness and attention. While attention selects the bounded object/semantics as a whole and produces the same-object advantage, consciousness remained on the visible parts only. |
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