Truman State University, United States.
Cognition. 2012 Dec;125(3):353-64. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.08.003. Epub 2012 Sep 16.
The function of consciousness was explored in two contexts of audio-visual speech, cross-modal visual attention guidance and McGurk cross-modal integration. Experiments 1, 2, and 3 utilized a novel cueing paradigm in which two different flash suppressed lip-streams cooccured with speech sounds matching one of these streams. A visual target was then presented at either the audio-visually congruent or incongruent location. Target recognition differed for the congruent versus incongruent trials, and the nature of this difference depended on the probabilities of a target appearing at these respective locations. Thus, even though the lip-streams were never consciously perceived, they were nevertheless meaningfully integrated with the consciously perceived sounds, and participants learned to guide their attention according to statistical regularities between targets and these unconsciously perceived cross-modal cues. In Experiment 4, McGurk stimuli were presented in which the lip-streams were either flash suppressed (4a) or unsuppressed (4b), and the McGurk effect was found to vanish under conditions of flash suppression. Overall, these results suggest a simple yet fundamental principle regarding the function of consciousness in multisensory integration - cross-modal effects can occur in the absence of consciousness, but the influencing modality must be consciously perceived for its information to cross modalities.
意识的功能在视听语音的两种情境中得到了探索，包括跨模态视觉注意力引导和麦格克跨模态整合。实验 1、2 和 3 利用了一种新颖的提示范式，其中两个不同的闪光抑制唇流与匹配其中一个唇流的语音同时出现。然后，在视听一致或不一致的位置呈现一个视觉目标。与不一致的试验相比，目标识别在一致的试验中有所不同，这种差异的性质取决于目标出现在这些位置的概率。因此，即使唇流从未被有意识地感知到，它们仍然与有意识感知到的声音有意义地整合在一起，参与者学会根据目标和这些无意识感知的跨模态线索之间的统计规律来引导注意力。在实验 4 中，呈现了麦格克刺激，其中唇流要么被闪光抑制（4a），要么未被抑制（4b），结果发现，在闪光抑制的条件下，麦格克效应消失了。总的来说，这些结果表明了关于多感觉整合中意识功能的一个简单而基本的原则——跨模态效应可以在没有意识的情况下发生，但为了其信息能够跨模态传递，影响模态必须被有意识地感知。
