School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9RH, UK; Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9RH, UK.
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin, 1202 West Johnson St, Madison, WI 53706-1611, USA.
Cognition. 2018 Jun;175:169-185. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.02.008. Epub 2018 Mar 16.
While theories of consciousness differ substantially, the 'conscious access hypothesis', which aligns consciousness with the global accessibility of information across cortical regions, is present in many of the prevailing frameworks. This account holds that consciousness is necessary to integrate information arising from independent functions such as the specialist processing required by different senses. We directly tested this account by evaluating the potential for associative learning between novel pairs of subliminal stimuli presented in different sensory modalities. First, pairs of subliminal stimuli were presented and then their association assessed by examining the ability of the first stimulus to prime classification of the second. In Experiments 1-4 the stimuli were word-pairs consisting of a male name preceding either a creative or uncreative profession. Participants were subliminally exposed to two name-profession pairs where one name was paired with a creative profession and the other an uncreative profession. A supraliminal task followed requiring the timed classification of one of those two professions. The target profession was preceded by either the name with which it had been subliminally paired (concordant) or the alternate name (discordant). Experiment 1 presented stimuli auditorily, Experiment 2 visually, and Experiment 3 presented names auditorily and professions visually. All three experiments revealed the same inverse priming effect with concordant test pairs associated with significantly slower classification judgements. Experiment 4 sought to establish if learning would be more efficient with supraliminal stimuli and found evidence that a different strategy is adopted when stimuli are consciously perceived. Finally, Experiment 5 replicated the unconscious cross-modal association achieved in Experiment 3 utilising non-linguistic stimuli. The results demonstrate the acquisition of novel cross-modal associations between stimuli which are not consciously perceived and thus challenge the global access hypothesis and those theories embracing it.
虽然意识理论有很大的不同，但“意识可及性假说”在许多流行的框架中都存在，该假说将意识与皮质区域中信息的全局可及性联系起来。该理论认为，意识对于整合来自不同功能的信息是必要的，例如不同感官所需的专业处理。我们通过评估在不同感觉模态中呈现的新颖的潜意识刺激对之间进行联想学习的潜力，直接检验了这一理论。首先，呈现了对潜意识刺激，然后通过检查第一个刺激对第二个刺激的分类的启动能力来评估它们的关联。在实验 1-4 中，刺激是由一个男性名字和一个创造性或非创造性的职业组成的单词对。参与者被潜意识地暴露于两个名字-职业对中，其中一个名字与创造性职业配对，另一个与非创造性职业配对。接下来是一个超意识任务，要求对其中一个职业进行定时分类。目标职业之前是与它潜意识配对的名字（一致）或另一个名字（不一致）。实验 1 通过听觉呈现刺激，实验 2 通过视觉呈现刺激，实验 3 通过听觉呈现名字和视觉呈现职业。所有三个实验都揭示了相同的反向启动效应，即一致的测试对与明显较慢的分类判断相关。实验 4 试图确定超意识刺激是否会更有效地学习，并发现了证据表明，当刺激被有意识地感知时，会采用不同的策略。最后，实验 5 复制了实验 3 中无意识的跨模态关联，使用了非语言刺激。结果表明，在不被有意识感知的情况下，新的跨模态刺激之间会获得关联，从而挑战了全局可及性假说和那些支持该假说的理论。
