Now You See It, Even If You Don’t

November 14, 2013
Image Credit: Thinkstock

Alan McStravick for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Freudian and Behavioral scientists have long been at odds regarding the validity of each school of thought. Freudians champion the idea that human perception is separated into three distinct compartments: the conscious, unconscious and pre-conscious. Behaviorists reject these constructs for their inability to be subjected to rigorous scientific testing. However, University of Arizona (UA) doctoral degree candidate Jay Sanguinetti may have just found a way to ruffle the feathers of the Behaviorist community.

Sanguinetti’s study, published online in the journal Psychological Science, indicates the brain can understand and process visual input, even when that input isn’t consciously perceived. This revelation is a challenge to the currently accepted models regarding how the brain processes visual information.

Sanguinetti, performing his research in UA’s Department of Psychology in the College of Science, presented a series of black silhouettes to his study participants. Embedded into the white outsides of some of the silhouettes were meaningful, real-world objects. Along with his doctoral adviser Mary Peterson, professor of psychology and director of UA’s Cognitive Science Program, and John Allen, UA Distinguished Professor of psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience, Sanguinetti employed the used of electroencephalograms (EEG) to monitor the subjects’ brainwaves while they observed the series of silhouettes.


As it turns out, data collected from Sanguinetti’s study definitively says yes.

According to the team, the brains of study participants processed the shapes on the silhouettes to the level of understanding their meaning, judging from their brainwaves. This was true even in instances when the participant never made a conscious recognition of the shape outside of the silhouetted image.



Had there been no N400 peaks, the team would be unable to make the claim that participants’ brains could recognize the meaning of the shapes on the outside of the figure.



In this second style of silhouettes in the series, the N400 waveform was absent from the EEG of the subjects. This means the brain, consciously or unconsciously, was unable to detect a meaningful object in the image.


Of course, the finding leads to more questions that will need to be addressed with further study. Chief among them: Why would the brain take the time to process the meaning of a shape when a person is ultimately not going to perceive it?

“The traditional opinion in vision research is that this would be wasteful in terms of resources,” Sanguinetti explained. “If you’re not going to ultimately see the object on the outside why would the brain waste all these processing resources and process that image up to the level of meaning?”



The team theorizes the march through time and evolution may have given our brains the ability to sift through the barrage of visual input we receive and ultimately identify only those things most important for us to perceive consciously, such as threats or resources like food.

Future study for the team will focus on the specific regions in the brain responsible for the processing of meaning.



Each image presented to the study’s participants was viewable for only 170 milliseconds. Despite this drastically abbreviated time, the subject’s brains were able to complete the complex processes necessary to interpret the meaning of the hidden objects contained in the silhouettes.


Sanguinetti’s study, funded by a grant to Peterson from the National Science Foundation, suggests our brains are working overtime all the time. As we walk down the street, our brains may recognize many meaningful objects in the visual scene, but our consciousness of those many objects is filtered down to merely a handful of what our brain recognizes. Our brain is taking in and shuffling massive amounts of information and releasing to us what it believes to be the best and most useful interpretation of the visual world.

Source: Alan McStravick for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

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