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Multisensory Integration in Complete Unawareness: Evidence From Audiovisual Congruency Priming

Year: 2014

Type: article

Abstract: Multisensory integration is thought to require conscious perception. Although previous studies have shown that an invisible stimulus could be integrated with an audible one, none have demonstrated integration of two subliminal stimuli of different modalities. Here, pairs of identical or different audiovisual target letters (the sound /b/ with the written letter "b" or "m," respectively) were preceded by pairs of masked identical or different audiovisual prime digits (the sound /6/ with the written digit "6" or "8," respectively). In three experiments, awareness of the audiovisual digit primes was manipulated, such that participants were either unaware of the visual digit, the auditory digit, or both. Priming of the semantic relations between the auditory and visual digits was found in all experiments. Moreover, a further experiment showed that unconscious multisensory integration was not obtained when participants did not undergo prior conscious training of the task. This suggests that following conscious learning, unconscious processing suffices for multisensory integration.

Source: Psychological Science

DOI: 10.1177/0956797614547916

Authors: Nathan Faivre, Liad Mudrik, Naama Schwartz, Christof Koch

Institutions: California Institute of Technology, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Tel Aviv University, Allen Institute for Brain Science

Language: English

Topic: Multisensory perception and integration

Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funders: Weizmann Institute of Science, Fondation Fyssen

OpenAlex ID: W2127840957

FWCI: 9.37

Cites: 41

Cited by: 127

Related to: 10