Abstract
Insight refers to the sudden conscious shift in the perception of a situation following a period of unconscious processing. The present study aimed to investigate the implicit neural mechanisms underlying insight-based recognition, and to determine the association between these mechanisms and the extent of pupil dilation. Participants were presented with ambiguous, transforming images comprised of dots, following which they were asked to state whether they recognized the object and their level of confidence in this statement. Changes in pupil dilation were not only characterized by the recognition state into the ambiguous object but were also associated with prior awareness of object recognition, regardless of meta-cognitive confidence. Our findings indicate that pupil dilation may represent the level of implicit integration between memory and visual processing, despite the lack of object awareness, and that this association may involve noradrenergic activity within the locus coeruleus-noradrenergic (LC-NA) system.
Highlights
When we recognize objects in daily life, our brains process the relevant visual information, regardless of whether we are conscious of this process
Object recognition was observed for 27% of stimuli in the first presentation session, while a lack of object recognition was observed for 37% of stimuli after the second, longer presentation session
We investigated the temporal dynamics of pupil dilation in order to elucidate the potential mechanisms underlying insight-based recognition of ambiguous objects
Summary
When we recognize objects in daily life, our brains process the relevant visual information, regardless of whether we are conscious of this process. We hypothesized that pupil dilation is associated with subjective comprehension within regions involved in memory retrieval and attention shifting prior to the moment of insight, and that this association is modulated by activation of the sympathetic nervous system during insight-based problem solving. Smith et al reported that eye movements are affected by the individual’s viewpoint of a familiar scene, and that awareness of the scene is determined by hippocampus-dependent memory[16] Based on these findings, we hypothesized that the awareness characterized by memory-related processing of an ambiguous object is associated with prior, implicit object-recognition processing. We further investigated the association between pupil dilation and meta-cognitive processing by asking participants to rate their level of confidence in the recognition of each object. In a follow-up experiment (Experiment 2), we investigated whether changes in pupil dilation were influenced by stimulus-specific features
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