The Gestalt In Unconscious Processing

It remains unclear whether higher-level aspects of visual stimuli can be representedwithout awareness. The global workspace theory suggested that basic stimulus propertiessuch as orientation, spatial frequency, color, and translational motion could still be encodedwhen rendered invisible. However, higher-level aspects of visual stimuli, for example, faceperception, the meaning of words, could not be processed without awareness. Meanwhile,the unconscious binding hypothesis insisted that object-related representation could beformed by early and late perceptual binding even under invisible situation. In this study, weused incomplete pictures to investigated whether gestalt could facilitate perceptual bindingduring binocular rivalry. Specific, we scrambled the complete and incomplete pictures toinvestigate:（1）whether there was a scrambled effect for both kinds of invisible pictures;（2） whether familiarity of the simple line pictures affected the time for stimuli breakingsuppression.Continuous flash suppression was used in our experiment. Three factors wereincluded: completeness of the construction （complete vs. incomplete）, destruction of themeaning（scrambled vs. non-scrambled）and familiarity（upright vs. inverted）. Subjectswere instructed to respond as accurately and quickly as possible the appearance of any partof the test image as soon as possible and regardless of the specific content of the image.Eighteen volunteers participated in the experiment （8males and10females）.Results showed that non-scrambled pictures occupied less time than scrambledpictures to gain dominance against the identical suppression noise; The scrambled effectwas observed both for incomplete and complete pictures; Upright pictures were not fasterto enter consciousness than inverted ones.These results suggested that the features in incomplete pictures, even suppressed andinvisible, could be bound together to form the object representation by gestalt. Apparently,high-level information （gestalt principles and meanings） of a stimulus did contribute tothe strength of breaking suppression during its suppressed phase. Substantial informationin the suppression phase of binocular rivalry could be processed to the extent thatobject-related representations could be achieved by gestalt. Our findings provided directevidence for the unconscious binding hypothesis.