No abstract

Is consciousness necessary for integration? Findings of seemingly high-level object-scene integration in the absence of awareness have challenged major theories in the field and attracted considerable scientific interest. Lately, one of these findings has been questioned because of a failure to replicate, yet the other finding was still uncontested. Here, we show that this latter finding-slowed-down performance on a visible target following a masked prime scene that includes an incongruent object-is also not reproducible. Using Bayesian statistics, we found evidence against unconscious integration of objects and scenes. Put differently, at the moment, there is no compelling evidence for object-scene congruency processing in the absence of awareness. Intriguingly, however, our results do suggest that consciously experienced yet briefly presented incongruent scenes take longer to process, even when subjects do not explicitly detect their incongruency.

How detailed are long-term-memory representations compared with working memory representations? Recent research has found an equal fidelity bound for both memory systems, suggesting a novel general constraint on memory. Here, we assessed the replicability of this discovery. Participants (total N = 72) were presented with colored real-life objects and were asked to recall the colors using a continuous color wheel. Deviations from study colors were modeled to generate two estimates of color memory: the variability of remembered colors—fidelity—and the probability of forgetting the color. Estimating model parameters using both maximum-likelihood estimation and Bayesian hierarchical modeling, we found that working memory had better fidelity than long-term memory (Experiments 1 and 2). Furthermore, within each system, fidelity worsened as a function of time-correlated mechanisms (Experiments 2 and 3). We conclude that fidelity is subject to decline across and within memory systems. Thus, the justification for a general fidelity constraint in memory does not seem to be valid.