Cognitive Neuroscience of Visual Awareness

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Under most circumstances, our visual systems are bombarded with much more information than they can handle. Because of this information overload, the majority of visual information is not subjectively experienced and seemingly goes unnoticed as well as unprocessed within the brain. Despite this impression, however, an increasing body of evidence suggests that unconscious visual information is indeed processed within our visual systems even though we remain unaware of it. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Ro and his colleagues will examine the cognitive and neural mechanisms for conscious and unconscious vision. One set of experiments will use procedures that will render some visual events unconscious to participants in order to determine whether the representations of unconscious visual stimuli are encoded at processing levels that are distinct from consciously perceived ones. Another set of experiments will use transcranial magnetic stimulation of the human primary visual cortex to manipulate neural processing and hence awareness of visual events. These transcranial magnetic stimulation experiments will investigate differences in information coding, neutral structures, and cortical pathways for conscious and unconscious vision.This research will provide a better understanding of visual information processing in the human brain and will lend some clues for developing useful compensatory strategies in patients with visual deficits. This work could also contribute towards the development of better visual assistive devices or prostheses for patients with congenital or acquired visual deficits. In addition, this project will provide training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral fellows at The City College of the City University of New York. The results of this funded research will be broadly disseminated to both scientific and lay audiences and should contribute towards enhancing scientific understanding by the public.