Unconscious perception, or perception without awareness, describes a situation where an observer's behaviour is influenced by a stimulus of which they have no phenomenal awareness. Perception without awareness is often claimed on the basis of a difference in thresholds for tasks that do and do not require awareness, for example, detecting the stimulus (requiring awareness) and making accurate...
Brain StimulationJune 27, 2015Arman Abrahamyan, Colin W.G. Clifford, Ehsan Arabzadeh et al.
Background: Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a popular functional mapping tool in cognitive and sensory neuroscience. While strong TMS typically degrades performance, two recent studies have demonstrated that weak TMS, delivered to visual cortex, can improve performance on simple visual tasks. The improvement was interpreted as the summation of visually-evoked and TMS-elicited...
Although a large proportion of the human brain is dedicated to processing incoming sensory information, much of this processing is not accessible to consciousness. In an effort to understand what differentiates conscious from unconscious processing, we are concerned here with methodological issues in exploring the limits of unconscious processing. We first consider a conscious perceptual...