In and Out of Consciousness: How Does Conscious Processing (D)evolve Over Time?

Mental information processing includes both unconscious and conscious modes and there are transitions between these two. The content of subjective experience can emerge from preconscious content, but an opposite process of loss of conscious content or its decay from subjective experience is an inevitable reality as well. Both ways of transition on the border between unconscious and conscious processing are ubiquitous. But how does this transition unfold over time? While there is quite some literature on whether conscious perception is all-or-none or graded (Sergent and Dehaene, 2004; Overgaard et al., 2006), we ask the complementary question: how does conscious perception change and evolve over time? While in phenomenological approaches in the philosophy of mind all-embracing temporal perspective has been acknowledged as crucial in understanding consciousness (e.g., anticipation, present, and retention in Husserl, 1928), in experimental paradigms only narrow temporal slices have been typically examined. We will first focus on the knowledge about the transitions gained from studying brief visual stimuli. According to the microgenetic tradition mental content does not emerge instantaneously, in an all-or-none manner (review: Bachmann, 2000). Instead, conscious content arises as a gradual process of formation where the initial transition (there was no content and now there is some content) grows over to a time consuming process where subjective phenomenal content of the same intentional object matures by acquiring systematically more qualities to the preceding version of the percept. This intentional object might be a visual object, scene, memory representation etc. These microgenetically developing attributes or characteristics include subjective clarity, subjective contrast, subjective fragmentariness/exhaustiveness, coarseness/detail, subjective stability, etc. (Bachmann, 2000, 2012). In other words, conscious experience of the content pertaining to the same intentional object changes considerably over time (See also Hegdé, 2008; Breitmeyer, 2014; Pitts et al., 2014). On the other hand (especially when brief objects typical to most of the experiments are presented) a certain experience with its phenomenal subjective content sooner or later disappears from consciousness by an analogous, but reversed gradual process—a kind of “anti-genesis” (Bachmann, 2000). Figure 1 illustrates the notion of microgenesis with its formative and disformative stages. Note that this figure is an abstraction based on the empiricial research described in Bachmann (2000). However, we hope that provocatively drawing this time course inspires researchers to investigate how it exactly looks like. This simple conceptualization prompts surprisingly many old and new questions.