Welcome to the new version of CaltechAUTHORS. Login is currently restricted to library staff. If you notice any issues, please email coda@library.caltech.edu
Published June 2021 | Erratum + Published
Journal Article Open

Subliminal temporal integration of linguistic information under discontinuous flash suppression

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.21.7.4

Attached Files

Published - i1534-7362-21-5-27_1624881418.13815.pdf

Erratum - i1534-7362-21-7-4_1626237281.73632.pdf

Files

i1534-7362-21-7-4_1626237281.73632.pdf
Files (745.9 kB)
Name Size Download all
md5:1ae0ccff938b1f0dc30386799b1cefa5
79.9 kB Preview Download
md5:23b0b1aa0dfe91e4b124721cf79c52ac
666.1 kB Preview Download

Additional details

Created:
August 20, 2023
Modified:
December 22, 2023