Abstract
A sufficient level of alerting, bottom-up stimulus strength, and attention have been proposed as important pre-requisites for conscious perception (Dehaene et al. in Trends Cogn Sci 10:204–211, 2006). The combination of different levels of each of these processes might differentially bias the access to consciousness, so that the impact of a specific factor on conscious access would depend on the levels of the other factors. To explore this possibility, we measured how the interaction between different levels of (phasic and tonic) alerting, stimulus bottom-up activation, and endogenous spatial attention, influences conscious perception. We observed that endogenous spatial attention affected conscious perception mainly when target bottom-up strength was low, by improving perceptual sensitivity and making the response criterion stricter. Attention-driven increases of perceptual sensitivity (without variations in response criterion) were also observed for higher levels of bottom-up strength, but only when tonic alerting decreased. Phasic alerting boosted perceptual sensitivity independently of target bottom-up strength, even though it differently affected response bias, yielding a more liberal response criterion when target bottom-up strength increases. These results suggest that a more exhaustive approach to the study of conscious perception should consider the interaction of the multiple factors that are susceptible to modulate perceptual consciousness, rather than studying their effects in isolation.
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Notes
The four-way interaction model has been not considered for the analysis, as there were no hypotheses concerning it.
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Acknowledgements
FB was supported with a postdoctoral Grant from the eraNET- NEURON BEYONDVIS project. ABC was supported with a Ramón y Cajal fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (RYC-2011-09320). Research was funded by research project PSI2014-58681-P, to ABC. The authors would like to thank María Cobos for her help in data collection.
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Botta, F., Ródenas, E. & Chica, A.B. Target bottom-up strength determines the extent of attentional modulations on conscious perception. Exp Brain Res 235, 2109–2124 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-017-4954-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-017-4954-z