Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 1081BT Amsterdam, The Netherlands;
Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 1081BT Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2017 Apr 4;114(14):3744-3749. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1617268114. Epub 2017 Mar 21.
The visual system has the remarkable ability to integrate fragmentary visual input into a perceptually organized collection of surfaces and objects, a process we refer to as perceptual integration. Despite a long tradition of perception research, it is not known whether access to consciousness is required to complete perceptual integration. To investigate this question, we manipulated access to consciousness using the attentional blink. We show that, behaviorally, the attentional blink impairs conscious decisions about the presence of integrated surface structure from fragmented input. However, despite conscious access being impaired, the ability to decode the presence of integrated percepts remains intact, as shown through multivariate classification analyses of electroencephalogram (EEG) data. In contrast, when disrupting perception through masking, decisions about integrated percepts and decoding of integrated percepts are impaired in tandem, while leaving feedforward representations intact. Together, these data show that access consciousness and perceptual integration can be dissociated.
视觉系统具有将零碎的视觉输入整合为一个可感知的表面和物体集合的非凡能力,我们称之为感知整合。尽管对感知进行了长期的研究,但仍不清楚完成感知整合是否需要意识的参与。为了研究这个问题,我们使用注意瞬脱来操纵意识的获取。我们表明,在行为上,注意瞬脱会损害对来自碎片化输入的整合表面结构存在的有意识决策。然而,尽管意识的获取受到了损害,但通过对脑电图(EEG)数据进行多元分类分析,解码整合知觉的能力仍然完好无损。相比之下,当通过掩蔽来破坏感知时,关于整合知觉的决策和对整合知觉的解码都会受到损害,而前馈表示则保持完好。这些数据表明,意识获取和感知整合可以分离。