Audiovisual Integration Facilitates Unconscious Visual Scene Processing

• Main Authors: Jye-Sheng Tan, 陳傑勝
• Other Authors: Su-Ling Yeh
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/80134087132455189169

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 心理學研究所 === 102 === It has been suggested that the meaning of a masked complex scene can be extracted in a single feedforward sweep. However, it remains unknown whether audiovisual integration occurs with an invisible complex visual scene. Here we 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 fast 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 found to be shorter in the audiovisual congruent condition than in the incongruent condition. This unconscious audiovisual integration occurred with full-scene pictures (Experiment 1), but not with objects-only (Experiment 2) or background-only (Experiment 3) pictures. The possibility of expectation feedback was excluded (Experiment 4). This is the first study demonstrating unconscious audiovisual integration with subliminal scene pictures. This finding not only supports the hypothesis that scenery semantic processing can be extracted in a feedforward pass, but also suggests that scene perception theories should be expanded to include unconscious audiovisual integration.