Object relations are processed with, but not without, awareness

TL;DR

The study found that understanding the relationship between objects requires conscious awareness, as unconscious processing did not show evidence of recognizing relatedness.

Contribution

The study provides empirical evidence that relational integration of objects depends on conscious processing.

Findings

Unconscious processing did not show differences in N400 amplitude for related versus unrelated object pairs.

Conscious awareness is necessary for processing relations between associatively linked objects.

Abstract

The scope of unconscious integration is widely debated. Here, we examined this question, focusing specifically on deciphering the relations between two associatively related objects, in a set of five behavioral and electrophysiological experiments. Participants were presented with masked pairs of related and unrelated objects and were asked to judge their relatedness. When the masked pairs were visible, we found both a behavioral priming effect and a difference in the magnitude of the electrophysiological N400 component for unrelated compared with related pairs. In sharp contrast, when the pairs were invisible (validated using both subjective and objective awareness measures), no convincing evidence was found for relatedness processing: with electroencephalography, no difference in N400 amplitude nor above-chance decoding of pair relations was found in two separate experiments. Based on these results, we conclude that the data do not support unconscious relatedness processing, suggesting that consciousness might have a prominent role in enabling relational integration beyond the single object level, which is in line with leading theories of consciousness.

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