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Interaction Between Conscious and Unconscious Information-Processing of Faces and Words

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Abstract

It is widely acknowledged that holistic processing is a key characteristic of face perception. Although holistic processing implies the automatic integration of face parts, it is unclear whether such processing requires the awareness of face parts. Here, we investigated the interactions between visible face parts and face parts rendered invisible using continuous flash suppression (CFS). In the first experiment with the upper half-face visible and the lower half-face invisible, the results showed that perceived face identity was influenced by the invisible lower half-face, suggesting that integration occurs between the visible and invisible face parts, a variant of the “composite face effect”. In the second experiment, we investigated the influence of visible face parts on the processing of invisible face parts, as measured by the time it took for the invisible parts to break out from CFS. The results showed a visible-to-invisible facilitation effect, that the aligned invisible face parts broke through CFS faster than when the visible and invisible face parts were misaligned. Visible eyes had a stronger influence on the invisible nose/mouth than the other way around. Such facilitation of processing from visible to invisible parts was also found when Chinese characters were used as stimuli. These results show that information integration occurs across the consciousness boundary.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences ( KJZD-SW-L08), Strategy Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Science ( XDB32020200), and the Beijing Municipal Science & Technology Commission (Z181100001518002).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101, China

    Shiwen Ren, Hanyu Shao & Sheng He

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Shiwen Ren & Sheng He

  3. CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Sahnghai, 20031, China

    Sheng He

  4. Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 55455, USA

    Sheng He

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  1. Shiwen Ren
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  2. Hanyu Shao
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Correspondence to Sheng He.

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Ren, S., Shao, H. & He, S. Interaction Between Conscious and Unconscious Information-Processing of Faces and Words. Neurosci. Bull. 37, 1583–1594 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12264-021-00738-0

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