Emmanouil Tatiana Aloi, Ro Tony
Baruch College and Graduate Center of the City University of New York, New York, USA,
Psychon Bull Rev. 2014 Oct;21(5):1188-94. doi: 10.3758/s13423-014-0590-9.
In the visual environment, objects often appear behind occluding surfaces, yet they are automatically and effortlessly perceived as complete. Here, we examined whether visually occluded objects that are presented below the threshold of awareness are amodally completed. We used a priming paradigm in which participants responded to consciously perceived targets that were preceded by unconsciously presented primes. In two experiments, we show that discrimination responses to targets were faster when they were preceded by congruent shapes, regardless of whether these shapes were intact and complete or occluded by a horizontal bar. This priming effect was not produced by a partial match in features, since the occluded primes did not facilitate responses to targets that shared local features (Experiment 1) or contained only the object features that remained visible after occlusion (Experiment 2). These results show that objects presented below the threshold of awareness can be amodally completed and provide compelling evidence that unconscious processing occurs to a greater extent than previously considered.
在视觉环境中，物体常常出现在遮挡表面之后，但它们仍能被自动且轻松地感知为完整的。在此，我们研究了呈现于意识阈值以下的视觉遮挡物体是否会进行非模态完成。我们采用了一种启动范式，即参与者对有意识感知到的目标做出反应，这些目标之前有无意识呈现的启动刺激。在两个实验中，我们发现当目标之前出现一致形状时，对目标的辨别反应更快，无论这些形状是完整无缺的还是被水平条遮挡的。这种启动效应并非由特征的部分匹配产生，因为被遮挡的启动刺激并未促进对共享局部特征的目标的反应（实验1），也未促进对仅包含遮挡后仍可见的物体特征的目标的反应（实验2）。这些结果表明，呈现于意识阈值以下的物体可以进行非模态完成，并提供了令人信服的证据，证明无意识加工的发生程度比之前认为的要大。
