Abstract
AbstractRecently, our team found that category-selective attention could modulate tool processing at the partial awareness level and unconscious face processing in the middle occipital gyrus (MOG). However, the modulation effects in MOG were in opposite directions across the masked tool and masked face conditions in that study: MOG activation decreased in the masked faces condition but increased in the masked tools condition under the consistent compared with the inconsistent cue-selective-attentional modulation. In the present study, in order to confirm that the opposite effects were due to the changed contours of the tools, using the same tool pictures and fMRI technique, we devised another two conditions: variant mirror tool picture condition and invariant tool picture condition. The results showed that, during the variant mirror tool picture condition, activation in the MOG decreased under tool-selective attention compared with face-selective attention. Interestingly, however, during the invariant too...
Highlights
There are two ways by which consciousness states can interact with each other (Tu & Zhao, 2014): interactive influences within conscious or unconscious processes, and influences between conscious and unconscious processes
For the masked variant mirror-image tool picture condition, the excessive activation hypothesis predicts that the modulation activation in the middle occipital gyrus (MOG) should increase after a tool selective attention cue compared with a face selective attention cue, which would be similar to the tool processing at a partial awareness level in Tu, Qiu, et al.’s (2013) experiment
They found an opposite pattern of results in the masked tool condition which indicated that the modulation activation in the MOG increased under tool-selective attention compared with face-selective attention, i.e. (TDT − FDT) > (TB − FB), which contradicted the predictive coding theory
Summary
There are two ways by which consciousness states can interact with each other (Tu & Zhao, 2014): interactive influences within conscious or unconscious processes, and influences between conscious and unconscious processes. Different states of consciousness (partially conscious vs completely unconscious) and the changing vs constant contours of the masked targets might have both played a role in causing the opposite patterns of results for the face and the tool processing conditions in the Tu, Qiu, et al.’s study (2013). For the masked variant mirror-image tool picture condition, the excessive activation hypothesis predicts that the modulation activation in the MOG should increase after a tool selective attention cue compared with a face selective attention cue, which would be similar to the tool processing at a partial awareness level in Tu, Qiu, et al.’s (2013) experiment. As far as we know, this is the first time that the continuous nature of the interaction between top-down modulation and partial awareness processing was revealed
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