The visual system can integrate fragmented input into organized surfaces and objects, a process called perceptual integration. Whether this requires conscious access was tested using the attentional blink, which impairs conscious perception. Behaviorally, the attentional blink reduced accurate conscious decisions about integrated surface structure. Yet, multivariate EEG decoding showed the brain still represented integrated percepts even when conscious access was blocked. In contrast, masking impaired both conscious decisions and neural decoding of integration, while leaving feedforward signals intact. These findings indicate that perceptual integration can occur without access to consciousness, dissociating the two processes.
Consciousness may be the explicit memory of past events or the cognitive capacity to simulate events, used to remember the past, experience the present, or imagine the future. Perceptual mechanisms represent an ongoing, editable best estimate of past, present, and future. At milliseconds to seconds timescales, there may be no hard boundary between perception and memory. Conscious perceptions, decisions, and actions are simulations of prior unconscious sensations, decisions, and actions. The neural correlates of consciousness may thus be those of simulation or explicit memory, involving the default mode, frontoparietal control, and salience networks. Each aspect of consciousness may have its own neural correlate.