Abstract
Introspectively we experience a phenomenally rich world. In stark contrast, many studies show that we can only report on the few items that we happen to attend to. So what happens to the unattended objects? Are these consciously processed as our first person perspective would have us believe, or are they – in fact – entirely unconscious? Here, we attempt to resolve this question by investigating the perceptual characteristics of visual sensory memory. Sensory memory is a fleeting, high-capacity form of memory that precedes attentional selection and working memory. We found that memory capacity benefits from figural information induced by the Kanizsa illusion. Importantly, this benefit was larger for sensory memory than for working memory and depended critically on the illusion, not on the stimulus configuration. This shows that pre-attentive sensory memory contains representations that have a genuinely perceptual nature, suggesting that non-attended representations are phenomenally experienced rather than unconscious.
Highlights
When watching a beautiful scene, for example when standing on top of a just conquered mountain, it might feel as if you are conscious of every element present in front of your eyes
The results clearly show that all types of memory benefit from the Kanizsa illusion compared to the control condition
This shows that apart from the working memory component that contributed to the performance in the sensory memory conditions, there was a retro-cue benefit in the Kanizsa condition that exceeded the benefit resulting from the retro-cue in the control condition This suggests that the Kanizsa illusion was already represented in sensory memory, enabling an extra boost to the performance on these conditions over and above the boost that is seen without the Kanizsa illusion
Summary
When watching a beautiful scene, for example when standing on top of a just conquered mountain, it might feel as if you are conscious of every element present in front of your eyes. Studies using change detection have shown that when a scene is presented twice in succession, large changes often go unnoticed [1] This has led researchers to suggest that only those parts of a scene that are attended are consciously perceived [2,3,4]. We investigated the nature of unattended objects by assessing whether these objects carry hallmarks of conscious perception such as perceptual organization and perceptual inference, which are known to be absent during unconscious processing [9,10]
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