Multisensory Integration in Complete Unawareness: Evidence From Audiovisual Congruency Priming
Open accessAbstract
Multisensory integration is thought to require conscious perception. Although previous studies have shown that an invisible stimulus could be integrated with an audible one, none have demonstrated integration of two subliminal stimuli of different modalities. Here, pairs of identical or different audiovisual target letters (the sound /b/ with the written letter “b” or “m,” respectively) were preceded by pairs of masked identical or different audiovisual prime digits (the sound /6/ with the written digit “6” or “8,” respectively). In three experiments, awareness of the audiovisual digit primes was manipulated, such that participants were either unaware of the visual digit, the auditory digit, or both. Priming of the semantic relations between the auditory and visual digits was found in all experiments. Moreover, a further experiment showed that unconscious multisensory integration was not obtained when participants did not undergo prior conscious training of the task. This suggests that following conscious learning, unconscious processing suffices for multisensory integration.
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- Authors
- Faivre, N., Mudrik, L., Schwartz, N., & Koch, C.
- Affiliations
- California Institute of Technology (US)
- Computation and Neural Systems, California Institute of Technology
- Corresponding author
- Faivre, Nathan
- Venue
- Psychological Science
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2014-09-30
- Volume
- 25
- Issue
- 11
- Pages
- 2006-2016
- ISSN
- 0956-7976 (ISSN-L)
- 1467-9280
- OpenAlex
- W2127840957
- Cited by
- 127
- References
- 42
- Citations by year
- 2026: 15 · 2025: 11 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 10 · 2022: 9 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 11 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 11 · 2017: 17 · 2016: 5 · 2015: 9 · 2014: 1
- FWCI
- 14.80
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- infoscience.epfl.ch
- Locations
- Psychological Science (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- CaltechAUTHORS (California Institute of Technology) (submittedVersion)
- HAL (submittedVersion)
- Infoscience (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) (submittedVersion)
- Infoscience (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Weizmann Institute of Science
- Fondation Fyssen
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Multisensory perception and integration
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Tactile and Sensory Interactions
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neuroscience and Music Perception
- Keywords
- multisensory integration, unconscious processes, subliminal perception, audiovisual congruency, priming, semantic priming, conscious perception, awareness, audiovisual speech perception, cross-modal perception, training effects
- MeSH terms
- Acoustic Stimulation, Adolescent, Adult, Awareness, Cues, Female, Humans, Male, Perceptual Masking, Photic Stimulation, Reaction Time, Subliminal Stimulation, Young Adult
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