The Anatomy of Non-conscious Recognition Memory

Non-conscious recognition of emotional body language.

Patients with cortical blindness can reliably perceive some facial expressions even if they are unaware of their percept. We examined whether emotional body language may also be recognized in the absence of the primary visual cortex and without conscious stimulus perception. We presented emotional and neutral body images in the blind field of a patient with unilateral striate cortex damage. Usi...

Can working memory be non-conscious?

Working memory (WM) is closely linked to conscious awareness: In most conceptions of WM, the inputs to WM need to be conscious. The findings of some recent studies, however, have been taken to suggest that WM can indeed operate on non-conscious inputs. Here, we argue that these findings can easily be accommodated by conventional conceptions of non-conscious perception and conscious WM. We concl...

Non-conscious Retention and Working Memory Load

Neural Evidence for Non-conscious Working Memory.

Recent studies have found that non-consciously perceived information can be retained for several seconds, a feat that has been attributed to non-conscious working memory processes. However, these studies have mainly relied on subjective measures of visual experience, and the neural processes responsible for non-conscious short-term retention remains unclear. Here we used continuous flash suppre...

The anatomy of memory.

W ithin the small volume of the human brain there is a sys­ tem of memory powerful enough to capture the image of a face in a single encounter, ample enough to store the experiences of a lifetime and so versatile that the memory of a scene can summon associated recollections of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations and emotions. How does this memory system work? Even de­ fining mem...