title: Multisensory integration in complete unawareness: evidence from audiovisual congruency priming.
abstract: Multisensory integration is thought to require conscious perception. Although previous studies have shown that an invisible stimulus could be integrated with an audible one, none have demonstrated integration of two subliminal stimuli of different modalities. Here, pairs of identical or different audiovisual target letters (the sound /b/ with the written letter "b" or "m," respectively) were preceded by pairs of masked identical or different audiovisual prime digits (the sound /6/ with the written digit "6" or "8," respectively). In three experiments, awareness of the audiovisual digit primes was manipulated, such that participants were either unaware of the visual digit, the auditory digit, or both. Priming of the semantic relations between the auditory and visual digits was found in all experiments. Moreover, a further experiment showed that unconscious multisensory integration was not obtained when participants did not undergo prior conscious training of the task. This suggests that following conscious learning, unconscious processing suffices for multisensory integration.
authors.affiliation: Computation and Neural Systems, California Institute of Technology Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Brain Mind Institute, School of Life Sciences, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne nathan.faivre@epfl.ch.
authors.forename: Nathan
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Faivre
authors.affiliation: Computation and Neural Systems, California Institute of Technology.
authors.forename: Liad
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Mudrik
authors.affiliation: Computation and Neural Systems, California Institute of Technology.
authors.forename: Naama
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Schwartz
authors.affiliation: Computation and Neural Systems, California Institute of Technology Allen Institute for Brain Science, Seattle, Washington.
authors.forename: Christof
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Koch
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001364:Awareness; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011930:Reaction Time; D013360:Subliminal Stimulation; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: awareness; consciousness; masking; multisensory integration; open data; open materials; semantic priming