Microtemporal analyses of object perception

Abstract

The study of visual consciousness relies on methodological approaches such as psychophysical, brain-imaging/recording, objective behavioral, and subjective descriptive ones. However, because the conscious registration of a stimulus requires its prior processing for many tens or several hundreds of milliseconds at unconscious levels, an overarching methodological approach is the microtemporal approach. After a stimulus attains registration in consciousness, it also can be processed at later and higher conscious levels. The microgenetic approach has been useful especially in studying visual masking. The microgenetic approach is premised on an analogy between microgenetic “evolution” of the processing of a stimulus and the macroevolutions of consciousness on phylogenetic and ontogenetic time scales. The microtemproal approach strives to delineate the processing at these various unconscious and conscious stages and levels, using, for example, simple and choice reaction times, visual masking techniques, transcranial magnetic stimulation, electroencephalographic recordings, magnetoencephalographic recordings, as well as eclectrophysiological recordings of individual neurons.