Windows of Integration Hypothesis Revisited.

Rony Hirschhorn,Inbal Gur-Arie,Ofer Kahane,Liad Mudrik,Nathan Faivre

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2020.617187

Abstract

In the ongoing research of the functions of consciousness, special emphasis has been put on integration of information: the ability to combine different signals into a coherent, unified one. Several theories of consciousness hold that this ability depends on – or at least goes hand in hand with – conscious processing. Yet some empirical findings have suggested otherwise, claiming that integration of information could take place even without awareness. Trying to reconcile this apparent contradiction, the “windows of integration” (WOI) hypothesis claims that conscious access enables signal processing over large integration windows. The hypothesis applies to integration windows defined either temporally, spatially, or semantically. In this review, we explain the hypothesis and re-examine it in light of new studies published since it was suggested. In line with the hypothesis, these studies provide compelling evidence for unconscious integration, but also demonstrate its limits with respect to time, space, and semantic distance. The review further highlights open questions that still need to be pursued to demonstrate the applicability of the WOI hypothesis as a guiding principle for understanding the depth and scope of unconscious processes.

Highlights

What are the relations between integration and consciousness? This question has not ceased to intrigue scholars across disciplines and is still unresolved
We describe the main findings of these papers, and try to classify them according to window size
Similar facilitation was not found when the invisible contextual inducers formed a word with the visible ambiguous stimulus, suggesting that unconscious integration was limited to the categorical level and did not occur at the lexical one, in line with WOIH2. Another way to assess this hypothesis is to examine studies that did not find evidence for unconscious integration, and contrast them with studies that did: do they differ in the size of probed Semantic Processing Integration Window (SPIW)? Overall, the answer seems to be positive, at least under the interpretation we suggest here

Summary

Introduction

What are the relations between integration and consciousness? This question has not ceased to intrigue scholars across disciplines (for review, see Mudrik et al, 2014) and is still unresolved. Many studies found evidence supporting WOIH1, reporting different forms of unconscious integration between two and sometimes even three words, mostly at the pre-sentence level, for tasks that seem to require relatively shallow processing; behaviorally, response-time congruency effects were evoked by categorically related pairs of words, compared to unrelated pairs (e.g., Pear and Orange vs Pear and Hammer in Tu et al, 2019a).

Results

Conclusion