Faivre Nathan, Kouider Sid
Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, CNRS/EHESS/DEC-ENS, Paris, France.
J Vis. 2011 Mar 3;11(3):2. doi: 10.1167/11.3.2.
The conscious representation we build from the visual environment appears jumbled in the periphery, reflecting a phenomenon known as crowding. Yet, it remains possible that object-level representations (i.e., resulting from the binding of the stimulus' different features) are preserved even if they are not consciously accessible. With a paradigm involving gaze-contingent substitution, which allows us to ensure the constant absence of peripheral stimulus discrimination, we show that, despite their jumbled appearance, multi-feature crowded objects, such as faces and directional symbols, are encoded in a nonconscious manner and can influence subsequent behavior. Furthermore, we show that the encoding of complex crowded contents is modulated by attention in the absence of consciousness. These results, in addition to bringing new insights concerning the fate of crowded information, illustrate the potential of the Gaze-Contingent Crowding (GCC) approach for probing nonconscious cognition.
我们从视觉环境构建的有意识表征在周边区域显得杂乱无章，这反映了一种被称为拥挤效应的现象。然而，即使物体层面的表征（即由刺激的不同特征绑定产生的表征）无法被有意识地获取，它们仍有可能被保留下来。通过一种涉及注视点依赖替换的范式，这种范式使我们能够确保周边刺激辨别始终不存在，我们发现，尽管多特征拥挤物体（如面孔和方向符号）外观杂乱，但它们是以无意识的方式进行编码的，并且能够影响后续行为。此外，我们还表明，在没有意识的情况下，复杂拥挤内容的编码会受到注意力的调节。这些结果，除了为拥挤信息的命运带来新的见解外，还说明了注视点依赖拥挤效应（GCC）方法在探究无意识认知方面的潜力。
