Subliminal temporal integration of linguistic information under discontinuous flash suppression
- Creators
- Hung, Shao-Min
- Hsieh, Po-Jang
Abstract
Whether unconscious complex visual information integration occurs over time remains largely unknown and highly controversial. Previous studies have tended to use a combination of strong masking or suppression and a weak stimulus signal (e.g., low luminance), resulting in a low signal-to-noise ratio during unconscious stimulus presentation. To lengthen the stimulus exposure, we introduced intermittent presentation into interocular suppression. This discontinuous suppression allowed us to insert a word during each suppression period and deliver multiple words over time unconsciously. We found that, after participants received the subliminal context, they responded faster to a syntactically incongruent target word in a lexical decision task. We later replicated the finding in a separate experiment where participants exhibited chance performance on locating the subliminal context. These results confirmed that the sentential context was both subjectively and objectively subliminal. Critically, the effect disappeared when the context was disrupted by presenting only partial sentences or sentences with a reversed word order. These control experiments showed that the effect was not merely driven by word–word association but instead required integration over multiple words in the correct order. These findings support the possibility of unconscious high-level, complex information integration.
Additional Information
© 2021 The Authors. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Received January 4, 2021; published May 24, 2021. The authors thank Daw-An Wu (California Institute of Technology) for his suggestions and comments on the manuscript. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments that led to a clearer manuscript. We are grateful for the research funding provided by the James Boswell Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Caltech BBE Divisional Postdoctoral Fellowship to S.-M.H. and by the Yushan Young Scholar Program (NTU-108V0202) and Ministry of Science and Technology (109-2410-H-002-004-MY3) to P.-J. H. Commercial relationships: none.Errata
Corrections to: Subliminal temporal integration of linguistic information under discontinuous flash suppression. Journal of Vision 2021; 21(7):4. doi: https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.21.7.4Attached Files
Published - i1534-7362-21-5-27_1624881418.13815.pdf
Erratum - i1534-7362-21-7-4_1626237281.73632.pdf
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Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC8164368
- Eprint ID
- 110311
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20210819-224624910
- James G. Boswell Foundation
- Caltech Division of Biology and Biological Engineering
- NTU-108V0202
- National Taiwan University
- 109-2410-H-002-004-MY3
- Ministry of Science and Technology (Taipei)
- Created
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2021-08-20Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-08-20Created from EPrint's last_modified field