Conscious and unconscious influences

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To interact efficiently with our world we must quickly form perceptions - meaningful categorized interpretations of the external world - from the raw sensory input we receive. This can be very challenging given that sensory information is "noisy" both in terms of the features available to be sensed (i.e., often we only see some of the relevant features of objects in our world) and in terms of limitations of both our sensory and cognitive systems. Thus, the perceptual system must somehow extract the meaningful and relevant sensations from this noise, then somehow merge them to provide a meaningful overall percept. We term this ability Perceptual Integration, and the proposed research will allow us to understand it, and it's influence on other tasks, better. The research focuses on a new phenomenon we have recently produced in our lab, one we see as having the potential to provide rich new insights into perceptual integration. The basic phenomenon works as follows. We begin with short words (e.g., ONE) then form noisy versions of them by replacing letters with other random letters. When we replace two letters at a time, for example, we might create strings like ORT, OUF, DNR, SNW, CYE, QPE whereby the only non-random features is an O that occurs 1/3rd of the time in the first position, an N that occurs 1/3 of the time in the second, and an E that occurs 1/3rd of the time in the third position. The fascinating result is that if we present these nonsense strings in very quick succession repeatedly, participants report seeing the word "ONE" despite it never being presented. Somehow the information that is relatively more consistent becomes extracted and merged to form a meaningful percept. We propose a number of theoretically inspired experiments that will use this phenomenon as a window to gain a clearer understanding of this critical perceptual-integration process.