Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel.
Princeton Institute of Neuroscience, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
Cognition. 2021 Jun;211:104638. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104638. Epub 2021 Mar 16.
Perceptual conscious experiences result from non-conscious processes that precede them. We document a new characteristic of the cognitive system: the speed with which visual meaningful stimuli are prioritized to consciousness over competing noise in visual masking paradigms. In ten experiments (N = 399) we find that an individual's non-conscious visual prioritization speed (NVPS) is ubiquitous across a wide variety of stimuli, and generalizes across visual masks, suppression tasks, and time. We also find that variation in NVPS is unique, in that it cannot be explained by variation in general speed, perceptual decision thresholds, short-term visual memory, or three networks of attention (alerting, orienting and executive). Finally, we find that NVPS is correlated with subjective measures of sensitivity, as they are measured by the Highly Sensitive Person scale. We conclude by discussing the implications of variance in NVPS for understanding individual variance in behavior and the neural substrates of consciousness.
知觉意识体验源自于先于它们的无意识过程。我们记录了认知系统的一个新特征：在视觉掩蔽范式中，视觉有意义的刺激相对于竞争噪声被优先分配到意识中的速度。在十个实验中（N=399），我们发现个体的无意识视觉优先化速度（NVPS）在各种刺激中普遍存在，并且在视觉掩蔽、抑制任务和时间上都具有普遍性。我们还发现，NVPS 的变化是独特的，因为它不能用一般速度、知觉决策阈值、短期视觉记忆或三个注意力网络（警觉、定向和执行）的变化来解释。最后，我们发现 NVPS 与主观敏感性测量值相关，正如高度敏感人士量表所测量的那样。我们最后讨论了 NVPS 的变化对理解行为和意识的神经基础的个体差异的影响。
