Temporal integration by multi-level regularities fosters the emergence of dynamic conscious experience

The relationship between integration and awareness is central to contemporary theories and research on consciousness. Here, we investigated whether and how information integration over time, by incorporating the underlying regularities, contributes to our awareness of the dynamic world. Using binocular rivalry, we demonstrated that structured visual streams, constituted by shape, motion, or idiom sequences containing perceptual- or semantic-level regularities, predominated over their nonstructured but otherwise matched counterparts in the competition for visual awareness. Despite the apparent resemblance, a substantial dissociation of the observed rivalry advantages emerged between perceptual- and semantic-level regularities. These effects stem from nonconscious and conscious temporal integration processes, respectively, with the former but not the latter being vulnerable to perturbations in the spatiotemporal integration window. These findings corroborate the essential role of structure-guided information integration in visual awareness and highlight a multi-level mechanism where temporal integration by perceptually and semantically defined regularities fosters the emergence of continuous conscious experience.

The extended present: an informational context for perception

Several previous authors have proposed a kind of specious or subjective present moment that covers a few seconds of recent information. This article proposes a new hypothesis about the subjective present, renamed the extended present, defined not in terms of time covered but as a thematically connected information structure held in working memory and in transiently accessible form in long-term memory. The three key features of the extended present are that information in it is thematically connected, both internally and to current attended perceptual input, it is organised in a hierarchical structure, and all information in it is marked with temporal information, specifically ordinal and duration information. Temporal boundaries to the information structure are determined by hierarchical structure processing and by limits on processing and storage capacity. Supporting evidence for the importance of hierarchical structure analysis is found in the domains of music perception, speech and language processing, perception and production of goal-directed action, and exact arithmetical calculation. Temporal information marking is also discussed and a possible mechanism for representing ordinal and duration information on the time scale of the extended present is proposed. It is hypothesised that the extended present functions primarily as an informational context for making sense of current perceptual input, and as an enabler for perception and generation of complex structures and operations in language, action, music, exact calculation, and other domains.

The Lightness/Pitch Crossmodal Correspondence Modulates the Rubin Face/Vase Perception

We examine whether crossmodal correspondences (CMCs) modulate perceptual disambiguation by considering the influence of lightness/pitch congruency on the perceptual resolution of the Rubin face/vase (RFV). We randomly paired a black-and-white RFV (black faces and white vase, or vice versa) with either a high or low pitch tone and found that CMC congruency biases the dominant visual percept. The perceptual option that was CMC-congruent with the tone (white/high pitch or black/low pitch) was reported significantly more often than the perceptual option CMC-incongruent with the tone (white/low pitch or black/high pitch). However, the effect was only observed for stimuli presented for longer and not shorter durations suggesting a perceptual effect rather than a response bias, and moreover, we infer an effect on perceptual reversals rather than initial percepts. We found that the CMC congruency effect for longer-duration stimuli only occurred after prior exposure to the stimuli of several minutes, suggesting that the CMC congruency develops over time. These findings extend the observed effects of CMCs from relatively low-level feature-based effects to higher-level object-based perceptual effects (specifically, resolving ambiguity) and demonstrate that an entirely new category of crossmodal factors (CMC congruency) influence perceptual disambiguation in bistability.