Unconscious social integration: seeing social interactions between two invisible people

Abstract

One central question in the scientific and philosophical study of consciousness is regarding the scope of human consciousness. There remains lively debate whether high-level information integration is necessarily dependent on consciousness, or it could occur beyond the scope of consciousness. The current study discovered a novel type of unconscious high-level integration based on social interactions between two agents. By adopting a breaking continuous flash suppression paradigm, Experiments 1a & 1b found that two facing (and thus interactive) human heads broke through into awareness faster than non-facing (and thus non-interactive) pairs, indicating a privileged unconscious processing of social interactions. Experiments 2a and 2b showed that this effect was significantly diminished when the integration between two agents was disrupted by separating into single individuals or inverted presentation, suggesting that the unconscious priority of interactive pairs was a product of integration effect. Experiments 3a-3c demonstrated that the integration was driven by social interaction specifically, as it could only be observed for social agents but not for non-social daily objects or directional arrows. The demonstrations of unconscious social integration shown here suggest that the processing of social interactions has already occurred before conscious awareness, and thus provide a novel case for high-level integration without consciousness. These findings have critical implications in better understanding the scope of human consciousness as well as the origins of social vision.