title: Perceptual grouping without awareness: superiority of Kanizsa triangle in breaking interocular suppression.
abstract: Much information could be processed unconsciously. However, there is no direct evidence on whether perceptual grouping could occur without awareness. To answer this question, we investigated whether a Kanizsa triangle (an example of perceptual grouping) is processed differently from stimuli with the same local components but are ungrouped or weakly grouped. Specifically, using a suppression time paradigm we tested whether a Kanizsa triangle would emerge from interocular continuous flash suppression sooner than control stimuli. Results show a significant advantage of the Kanizsa triangle: the Kanizsa triangle emerged from suppression noise significantly faster than the control stimulus with the local Pacmen randomly rotated (t(9) = -2.78, p = 0.02); and also faster than the control stimulus with all Pacmen rotated 180° (t(11) = -3.20, p<0.01). Additional results demonstrated that the advantage of the grouped Kanizsa triangle could not be accounted for by the faster detection speed at the conscious level for the Kanizsa figures on a dynamic noise background. Our results indicate that certain properties supporting perceptual grouping could be processed in the absence of awareness.
authors: Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors: Lan
authors: L
authors: Wang
authors: Xuchu
authors: X
authors: Weng
authors: Sheng
authors: S
authors: He
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001364:Awareness / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009799:Ocular Physiological Phenomena; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult