Unconsciously elicited perceptual prior.

Increasing evidence over the past decade suggests that vision is not simply a passive, feed-forward process in which cortical areas relay progressively more abstract information to those higher up in the visual hierarchy, but rather an inferential process with top-down processes actively guiding and shaping perception. However, one major question that persists is whether such processes can be influenced by unconsciously perceived stimuli. Recent psychophysics and neuroimaging studies have revealed that while consciously perceived stimuli elicit stronger responses in higher visual and frontoparietal areas than those that fail to reach conscious awareness, the latter can still drive high-level brain and behavioral responses. We investigated whether unconscious processing of a masked natural image could facilitate subsequent conscious recognition of its degraded counterpart (a black-and-white "Mooney" image) presented many seconds later. We found that this is indeed the case, suggesting that conscious vision may be influenced by priors established by unconscious processing of a fleeting image.