Posterior parietal cortex mediates encoding processes in change blindness

Perception in the Absence of Attention: Perceptual Processing in the Roelofs Effect during Inattentional Blindness

“…For example, in CB participants' eye movements linger around an unreported change longer (Hollingworth 2003), and can guess the change better than chance when prompted (Fernandez-Duque and Thornton 2000;Tseng et al 2010aTseng et al , 2010b; but see Mitroff et al 2002, for an alternative account of the same phenomenon; for a review from both perspectives, see Tseng 2011, andHannula et al 2005). In AB, studies also show that semantic and numerical information are processed, although masked targets are not consciously perceived (Hsu et al 2010;Railo et al 2008).…”

“…However, the stimuli from each paradigm (especially in CB) vary so widely that a simple generalization is not warranted. Therefore, the variety of complex stimuli from CB have generated different findings that suggest CB can be a result of failure in encoding (Hollingworth and Henderson 2002;Tseng et al 2010aTseng et al , 2010b, visual memory (Wolfe 1999), or retrieval and comparison (Henderson and Hollingworth 2003). For instance, one might have encoded the item into memory and simply forgotten it during the interval between stimulus and response.…”

“…Neuroimaging evidence suggests that the conscious state of processing involves parieto-prefrontal activation and late amplification of posterior activity (Dehaene et al 2006). In contrast, only posterior activity is observed when people do not consciously perceive a changed stimulus (Fernandez-Duque et al 2003;Pourtois et al 2006), and artificial interference with posterior parietal activity can induce unawareness of visual changes (Beck et al 2001;Tseng et al 2010aTseng et al , 2010b. Patients with unilateral neglect, where parietal damage causes a loss of awareness for visual events occurring in the visual field on the contralesional side, also show extensive perceptual processing such as color/form extraction (Driver and Mattingley 1998) and image segmentation/completion (Mattingley et al 1997) in the absence of attention and/or awareness.…”