Multisensory Integration in Complete Unawareness: Evidence From Audiovisual Congruency Priming
Abstract
Multisensory integration is thought to require conscious perception. Although previous studies have shown that an invisible stimulus could be integrated with an audible one, none have demonstrated integration of two subliminal stimuli of different modalities. Here, pairs of identical or different audiovisual target letters (the sound /b/ with the written letter "b" or "m," respectively) were preceded by pairs of masked identical or different audiovisual prime digits (the sound /6/ with the written digit "6" or "8," respectively). In three experiments, awareness of the audiovisual digit primes was manipulated, such that participants were either unaware of the visual digit, the auditory digit, or both. Priming of the semantic relations between the auditory and visual digits was found in all experiments. Moreover, a further experiment showed that unconscious multisensory integration was not obtained when participants did not undergo prior conscious training of the task. This suggests that following conscious learning, unconscious processing suffices for multisensory integration.
Additional Information
© 2014 The Author(s). Received February 6, 2014. Accepted July 10, 2014. Published online before print September 30, 2014. Author Contributions: N. Faivre, L. Mudrik, and C. Koch designed the study. Data were collected by N. Schwartz and N. Faivre and analyzed by N. Faivre. All authors wrote the manuscript and approved the final version for submission. The authors thank Michael Herzog, Mauro Manassi, and Caitlin Duncan for their help with the control experiments and four anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. The authors declared that they had no conflicts of interest with respect to their authorship or the publication of this article. This research was supported by The G. Harold & Leila Y. Mathers Charitable Foundation. N. Faivre was supported by the Fyssen Foundation. L. Mudrik was supported by the Human Frontier Science Program and the Weizmann Institute of Science National Postdoctoral Award Program for Advancing Women in Science. Additional supporting information can be found at http://pss .sagepub.com/content/by/supplemental-data Open Practices: All data and materials have been made publicly available via Open Science Framework and can be accessed at https://osf.io/usfa5/?view_only=1f2e1994fc6247548499f47de64a2650. The complete Open Practices Disclosure for this article can be found at http://pss.sagepub.com/content/by/supplementaldata. This article has received badges for Open Data and Open Materials. More information about the Open Practices badges can be found at https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki/view/ and http://pss.sagepub.com/content/25/1/3.full.Attached Files
Supplemental Material - DS_10.11770956797614547916_OpenPracticesDisclosure.pdf
Supplemental Material - DS_10.11770956797614547916_SupplementalExperiments.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 50214
- DOI
- 10.1177/0956797614547916
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20141006-133628494
- G. Harold & Leila Y. Mathers Charitable Foundation
- Fyssen Foundation
- Human Frontier Science Program
- Weizmann Institute of Science
- Created
-
2014-10-09Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2023-06-06Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Koch Laboratory (KLAB)