Exploring conditions for the integration of relation without visual awareness

Abstract

Whether or not awareness is necessary for complex cognition and consequent behaviour continues to be debated. A series of recent studies have focused one particular cognitive function - judging the same/different relation of a pair of stimuli - and appear to show that this can occur with no subjective visual consciousness of the same stimuli. In this thesis, we explore the context and limits of this form of unconscious integration, with a focus on two concerns. First, an unconscious process simpler than genuine integration may be sufficient to account for previous effects involving multiple stimuli. Second, intermittent stimulus awareness could be responsible for driving these effects, and so any responsible process may not truly be unconscious. We investigate these issues using several paradigms and two novel additions: a richer stimulus set that eliminates some alternative explanations, and a new approach for assessing the absence of awareness. This exploration features converging evidence from four behavioural experiments. In Experiment 1, we replicate and extend an earlier finding of unconscious integration when participants subjectively report no awareness of the stimuli. Experiment 2 shows that this effect obtains when using a larger stimulus set, and when participants fail to identify the integrated stimuli. Finally, Experiments 3 and 4testwhether this unconscious integration of relation generalizes to classic masked priming paradigms. These results are discussed in the context of unconscious integration in particular, and with regard to theoretical and methodological issues in the general field of unconscious research.