This morning, Tad Zawidzki drew my attention to the publication on Tuesday of this paper: Multisensory Integration in Complete Unawareness. What Faivre et al report there is exactly the kind of phenomenon that Ryan Scott, Jason Samaha, Zoltan Dienes and I have been investigating. In fact, we have been aware of Faivre et al’s study and cite it in our paper (that is currently under review).
Their work is good, but ours goes further. Specifically, we show that:
- a) Cross-modal associations can be learned when neither of the stimuli in the two modalities are consciously perceived (whereas the Faivre et al study relies on previously learned associations between consciously perceived stimuli).
- b) Such learning can occur with non-linguistic stimuli.
Together, a) and b) really strengthen the case against accounts that assert that consciousness is required for multi-sensory integration (e.g., Global Workspace Theory). Some defenders of such theories might try to brush aside results like that of Faivre et al by revising their theories to say that consciousness is only required for higher-level cognition, such as learning; and/or by setting aside linguistic stimuli as a special case of (consciously) pre-learned cross-modal associations which can be exploited by unconscious processes to achieve the appearance of multi-sensory integration. Our results block both of these attempts to save (what we refer to as) integration theories.
PAICS 