Abstract
The visual system has the remarkable ability to integrate fragmentary visual input into a perceptually organized collection of surfaces and objects, a process we refer to as perceptual integration. Despite a long tradition of perception research, it is not known whether access to consciousness is required to complete perceptual integration. To investigate this question, we manipulated access to consciousness using the attentional blink. We show that behaviorally, the attentional blink impairs perceptual decisions about the presence of integrated surface structure from fragmented input. However, when applying a multivariate classifier to electroencephalogram (EEG) data, the ability to decode the presence of integrated percepts remains intact when conscious access is impaired. In contrast, when disrupting consciousness through masking, decisions about integrated percepts and decoding of integrated percepts are impaired in concert with each other, while leaving feedforward representations intact. Together, these data show a dissociation between access to consciousness and perceptual integration.
Significance statement Our brain constantly selects salient and/or goal-relevant objects from the visual environment, so that it can operate on neural representations of these objects. But what is the fate of objects that are not selected? Are these discarded, so that the brain only has an impoverished non-perceptual representation of them? Or does the brain construct perceptually rich representations, even when objects are not consciously accessed by our cognitive system? Here we answer that question by manipulating the information that enters into awareness, while simultaneously measuring cortical activity using EEG. We show that objects that do not enter consciousness can nevertheless have a neural signature that is indistinguishable from perceptually rich representations that occur for objects that do enter into conscious awareness.
