Audiovisual integration facilitates unconscious visual scene processing.

Abstract

Meanings of masked complex scenes can be extracted without awareness; however, it remains unknown whether audiovisual integration occurs with an invisible complex visual scene. The authors examine whether a scenery soundtrack can facilitate unconscious processing of a subliminal visual scene. The continuous flash suppression paradigm was used to render a complex scene picture invisible, and the picture was paired with a semantically congruent or incongruent scenery soundtrack. Participants were asked to respond as quickly as possible if they detected any part of the scene. Release-from-suppression time was used as an index of unconscious processing of the complex scene, which was shorter in the audiovisual congruent condition than in the incongruent condition (Experiment 1). The possibility that participants adopted different detection criteria for the 2 conditions was excluded (Experiment 2). The audiovisual congruency effect did not occur for objects-only (Experiment 3) and background-only (Experiment 4) pictures, and it did not result from consciously mediated conceptual priming (Experiment 5). The congruency effect was replicated when catch trials without scene pictures were added to exclude participants with high false-alarm rates (Experiment 6). This is the first study demonstrating unconscious audiovisual integration with subliminal scene pictures, and it suggests expansions of scene-perception theories to include unconscious audiovisual integration.