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Conscious and Unconscious Perception: An Approach to the Relations between Phenomenal Experience and Perceptual Processes
ANTHONY MRC Applied Psychology J. MARCEL Unit, Cambridge, England

An approach to the relationships between conscious perception and nonconscious perceptual processes is outlined. Its basis is the rejection of the assumption that phenomenal experience is identical to or is a direct reflection of representations yielded by perceptual processes. Nonconscious perceptual processes automatically redescribe sensory data into every representational form and to the highest levels of description available to the organism. Such processes (a) provide records of each resultant representation, (b) produce perceptual hypotheses in different domains, (c) activate related structures, and (d) affect analog aspects of actions. Conscious perception requires a constructive act whereby perceptual hypotheses are matched against information recovered from records, and serves to structure and synthesize that information recovered from different domains. These processes are related to three aspects of phenomenal experience: awareness, unity of percepts, and selectivity. Consciousness is seen as an attempt to make sense of as much data as possible at the most functionally useful level. Explication of the approach consists of (a) discussion of differences between conscious and nonconscious representations and processes; (b) exposition of the characteristics of the process of recovery; (c) a theory of central visual masking as a consequence of temporal and spatial parsing involved in recovery, wherein masking is seen as an aspect of the structural nature of consciousness whose goal is event perception, and does not affect nonconscious perceptual processing; (d) an interpretation of various clinical neuropsychological and normal phenomena in terms of limitations and impairments in the processes of recovery and synthesis; (e) reinterpretation of several perceptual phenomena in terms of the recovery of information and of how nonconscious processes precede and affect consciousness.

INTRODUCTION Much psychological investigation and theorizing rests on the Identity Assumption, whereby the representations which constitute conscious experience are assumed to be the very same ones that are derived and used in sensory and cognitive processing. Serious doubt was cast upon this paradigm assumption in the experimental paper which precedes this (Marcel, 1983). The data therein suggest a functional separation of (a) representations which result from analysis or processing of sensory data or aspects of it and which can influence behavior, from (b) phenomenological representations which can be reflected upon or reI am grateful to Leslie Henderson for helpful discussion on a previous draft of this paper, to Stephen Palmer and Earl Hunt for painstaking suggestions as to clarification, and to George Mandler, Alan Baddeley, and Mike Posner for encouragement. 238 OOlO-0285183 $7.50
Copyright @ 1983 by Academic Press, Inc.

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ported or which serve as the basis for intentional actions. In this paper an attempt will be made to sketch an approach to the relationship of conscious percepts to nonconscious perceptual processing. These proposals do not depend on the experiments in the preceding paper, but they were provoked partially by them and are encouraged by them. Before going any further it may be useful to recapitulate the results of those experiments. Experiment 1 showed that when target-pattern mask SOAs (stimulus-onset asynchronies) are too brief to enable detection, graphic and semantic similarity judgments can be made to the target. As SOAs were reduced, detection, graphic, and semantic judgments were precluded in that order; that is, in the opposite order to which perceptual analysis is supposed to proceed. The recalcitrance of certain subjects itself emphasizes the inadequacy of a technique designed to assess processing which requires people to address their knowledge directly. In Experiment 2, when choice stimuli covaried negatively on graphic and semantic similarity, subjects could no longer reliably make such judgments. This suggests that graphic and semantic similarity judgments were made on the basis of passive orientation responses due to residual activation from the nondetected word, rather than on the basis of subjects ability to selectively address characteristics of the masked word. Experiments 3, 4, and 5 showed that when an indirect measure of perceptual processing is used (associative effects of the undetected word on a subsequent task) all subjects show the effects of undetected stimuli. Experiment 4 showed that while the effect holds with central pattern masking, it is not obtained with peripheral energy masking. Experiment 5 showed that repetition of a word followed by a pattern mask increases the effect of semantic association on a related word, but has no effect on awareness or on the semantic content of forced guesses. These experiments raise several issues, the most obvious being the nature of masking, the relation of apparently automatic nonconscious processing to conscious representations and intentional processes, and a reevaluation of studies which have taken consciously based responses to reflect perceptual processes in general. What follows will attempt to deal speculatively with these and related issues. What will be provided is not a model, but rather a way of looking at the processes involved in conscious experience and in tasks. Very few of the constructs in the theory are novel; it is in their functional role that there is a change in emphasis. To begin with an attempt will be made to indicate and give some criteria for what is under discussion. A brief outline will then be given of the proposed approach to the relations between conscious experience and perceptual processing, primarily in vision but extendable to other domains. The main body of the paper consists of an expanded explication of this approach. First, differences between nonconscious and conscious

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processes and representations will be discussed. Second, characteristics of a central construct relating the two domains, the process of recovery of information, will be dealt with. Third, an approach to central masking will be put forward, whereby it is seen not to affect perceptual processing itself, but as a phenomenological consequence of temporal and spatial parsing involved in recovery. Fourth, normal and clinical neuropsychological phenomena will be used to exemplify the consequence of limitations and breakdowns in the processes of recovery and synthesis. Fifth, several effects in the experimental literature on perception and cognition will be reinterpreted in terms of characteristics of recovery and of effects of nonconscious on conscious treatment of an event. Finally some implications of the approach will be briefly touched on. What follows is an attempt to provide an alternative approach rather than a complete or tight account of the phenomena in question.
DEFINITIONAL DISTINCTIONS

The primary criterion for consciousness is phenomenal awareness. There is a twofold reason for focusing on this, as opposed to other aspects emphasized by psychologists, such as capacity or behavioral organization (see, e.g., Shallice, 1978). First, historically, phenomenal experience has been the raison detre for discussions of the concept in the first place (Strange, 1978; Battista, 1978). Second, whatever other associated properties we may focus on, practical criteria for consciousness, e.g., clinical, always rely in some sense on awareness, whatever the operational test. Awareness is taken to be the prerequisite of an ability to acknowledge or comment upon our percepts, thoughts, memories, and actions. However, there is a second definitional criterion which is difficult to separate from the first. This is the ability to base intentional, categorical action upon a perceptual (or imaginal) experience. Many aspects of our actions such as their detailed components or analog aspects can be determined both at a nonconscious level and by aspects of the environment of which no conscious acknowledgment need be made (Turvey, 1977a). However, apart from reflex activities, a percept has to be conscious if we are to voluntarily initiate one action as opposed to another on its basis. In some sense the criteria1 reason why the representational basis of voluntary actions has to be conscious is that it is the reason we give if asked why we did something. In this sense it differs little from the notion of awareness in that we are concerned with a representation which can be acknowledged or commented on by the perceiver or actor. Of course it can be argued that this is an illusion, that such reasons or comments are not the causes of our behavior, but merely an account of our behavior to conform with, say, cultural beliefs in rationality. It will be suggested below that phenomenal experience may indeed be thought of as

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an account. Nevertheless, the fact that it precedes action precludes the argument that it is an account that only occurs after the event. Thus we can choose or set up what aspect of an event is to control the categories of our behavior, as opposed to those aspects which merely affect the parameters of the act. In a task or experiment a person can decide to base categorical responses on whether two strings of letters are visually the same or different and maintain consistency (be correct), quite apart from the fact that he or she is affected by (e.g., in the latency of response) whether or not the stimuli are words. It should be made clear that this paper is not in the main addressing that sense of the term consciousness whereby one might ask whether someone is or is not conscious. Nor is it (at least not primarily) states of consciousness which are to be discussed. Rather, consciousness is addressed in the sense of whether or not someone is aware of something. It is the intensional aspect of consciousness which is of concern. Phenomenologists, from Brentano (1874) and Husserl(l929) onward, have held that this is the fundamental property of consciousness, that consciousness always has an object, that we are always conscious of something. What is at issue is what it means to be conscious of something. A central proposal of this paper is that to be conscious ofx is to be understood as being conscious of x as a proper segment of space and/or time, i.e., as a primitive at the relevant level of perceptual organization. The following discussion will not address the function(s) of consciousness. Nor will it address its nature, except insofar as it is an attempt to provide one form of process-oriented approach to perceptual phenomena.
OUTLINE OF THE APPROACH

At this point the basic constructs of the proposed approach and how they relate will be introduced. In order to clarify the pragmatic force of the approach, let us return to the starting point. The strongest version of theory generated by the Identity Assumption is that the representations produced by perceptual processes and those constituting conscious experience are one and the same entity. This is captured in Fig. 1. A weaker form of this view, which permits selective attention to different perceptual descriptions and which is plausibly what is actually assumed by many information processing accounts, is to treat conscious experience as the product of an active attentional process. But this still treats the information addressed by such a process as identical with that utilized by subsequent perceptual recoding systems. This is represented in Fig. 2. This is essentially the position which the experiments in the preceding paper have been taken to challenge. It is possible to prevent awareness of particular perceptual descriptions and the ability to base categorical behavior on them without preventing their unconscious effects on behavior.

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Conscious

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Sensory Array

(--CM)-----

FIG. 2. Weak version of the Identity Assumption-where conscious experience results from a separate process, but its representations are those produced and used in perceptual processing. (Here and in following figures, solid lines represent automatic processes, dashed lines represent intentional/selective processes.)

Further, Experiment 5 demonstrated that it is possible to enhance such unconscious effects without changing the availability to consciousness of the cause of the effects. For these types of reasons it is suggested as a useful first step to separate functionally those representations automatically yielded by and utilized by perceptual analyses from those of which we are conscious. What might be meant by such a separation? Clearly, phenomenal experience is not merely a separate copy of nonconscious representations; if it were so, one could not affect them differentially. Nor can what is conscious be merely a separate subset of what is nonconscious, since much evidence (some of which is reviewed in the section below on Differences) suggests that the conscious representation of something is often qualitatively different from its nonconscious representation. The essence of the present view is that phenomenal percepts depend on nonconscious sensory analysis (or activity in such mechanisms), but also on certain further operations which render the form of the phenomenal representation qualitatively different. It is from these further operations that the intensional aspect of phenomenal experience derives. Thus, nonconscious sensory analysis registers what impinges on external and internal receptors as a nondisjointed flow (it does not segment into events, objects, episodes); it codes all aspects of what impinges at every level and in every code with which the organism is equipped; within each such representational domain what impinges is represented in all possible articulations. Phenomenal experience consists in the imposition of a particular segmentation and structure on what is otherwise unsegmented (i.e., nonintensional) and the imposition of a particular interpretation on what otherwise consists of multiple interpretations. Let us now specify the principal components of what is being proposed.

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1. All sensory data impinging however briefly upon receptors sensitive to them is analyzed, transformed, and redescribed, automatically and quite independently of consciousness, from its source form into every other representational form that the organism is capable of representing, whether by nature or by acquisition. This process of redescription will proceed to the highest and most abstract levels within the organism. Further, within every domain of redescription, wherever more than one parsing is possible of the data presented to it, all possible parsings will be carried out and represented. The structure of systems which automatically process sensory input is distributed as well as hierarchical. Some systems depend on the outputs of others, e.g., lexical analysis of alphabetic print depends on a representation in terms of strokes and letters. However, systems such as form and color operate independently. Good evidence for such distributed processing comes from neuropsychological dissociations (Ratcliff & Cowey, 1979). 2. An important functional distinction will now be made concerning the products of automatic processes of sensory analysis. Each analytic or redescriptive process which transmits and transforms sensory data obviously has an output, which is a particular data description. Two aspects of each such output can be distinguished. There is that aspect which, due to the normal fact that the sensory environment is constantly changing, is dynamic and impermanent. This will be termed the result. An aspect can also be postulated which is the temporally extended trace of an output and which can be retrieved. This will be termed the record. While two terms are used and while the distinction is made diagrammatically explicit in Fig. 3, it should be emphasized that we are distinguishing between two aspects of a single entity, differentiated by the uses to which they are put. Results have several different automatic effects and roles at a nonconscious level. First, they provide data which is immediately fed to or used by all other processors which can take such a representational code as input for further transformations. Second, nonconsciously the outputs of specialist processors, alone, support a large amount of our behavior, especially those aspects emphasized by Turvey (1977a), i.e., both the basic context of actions (e.g., postural adjustments) and their detailed realizations, as well as our orientation in space. Third, the results of coding processes will be in terms of patterns of activation which will in turn activate structurally related and associated representations in their respective representational domains. (That is, they produce priming.) Fourth, all levels and types of description will suggest candidate perceptual hypotheses. That is, data descriptions activate canonical representations of permanently stored perceptual and conceptual categories, which specify features needed to verify them.

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These results of sensory analyses in their role of suggesting hypotheses form one of the bases of what may become conscious. However, this is insufficient. Each analytic and redescriptive process also yields a record of its output, and it is such records which provide the basis of the form and content of conscious percepts. The record of the output of some sensory analysis may be inaccessible to consciousness while the result itself may be fully effective in influencing behavior and quite accessible to other nonconscious redescriptive systems. This distinction is a functional one. No claim is being made that results and records are separate entities. However, in a speculative vein, since records are viewed as supporting retrieval, some degree of mnemonic persistence would probably benefit from separation from machinery that is in constant flow. These distinctions are represented in Fig. 3. Both results and records are nonconscious. What relates records to conscious percepts is indicated in Paragraph 4 below. 3. Perceptual hypotheses are themselves unconscious. They are canonical representations of perceptual and conceptual categories at various levels and constitute the total set of those categories and distinctions that we can consciously perceive. A perceptual hypothesis is here conceived of as a structural description which specifies its criteria1 features (plus noncriterial features) and their relationships. The values of those features is left open to particular instantiations which vary from occasion to occasion (episodic). Perceptual hypotheses are activated automatically if any of their criteria1 features are matched by descriptions yielded at the next lower level of sensory analysis, or if their own category is yielded at the equivalent level of sensory analysis. Perceptual hypotheses, in representing our knowledge of the perceivable world, are analogous to Minskys (1975) concept of frames and to Rumelharts (1978) discussion of schemata. But note that here they are not the mechanism of perceptual analysis, but that of conscious percepts. They will be constrained by constructs available at any one time and in any one culture to an individual. This is one way in which what an individual is capable of being aware of, and the way in which he or she is aware of it, is moulded. Indeed, since perceptual hypotheses are the basis of conscious percepts, they are the basis of the particular intensionality of our experience. However, neither the records of sensory analysis nor perceptual hypotheses are sufficient for conscious percepts. A conscious percept is
obtained by a constructive sensory source. act of fitting a perceptual hypothesis to its

Phenomenal experience has to have some form, and hypotheses will remain unconscious unless they bear some relation to some description of

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sensory .... Array . . . Hypotheses Type A Hypotheses Type B

FIG. 3. Illustration of the proposed distinctions within automatic perceptual processing. Processes which analyze and transform information produce a resulting representation and a record of it. Results (a) serve as input to other processors, (b) automatically modulate mechanisms relying on activation (priming, motor adjustments), (c) produce perceptual hypotheses. Perceptual hypotheses guide recovery of information from records, which serves to verify alternative hypotheses. Conscious percepts normally require synthesis of verified information.

g r

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sensory data. While we may not be sure how to interpret what we see or hear, we must at least be conscious of something. In addition, since the outputs of sensory processes can suggest alternative perceptual hypotheses, the data from records will serve to disambiguate. This is also necessary since we can only be conscious of one perceptual hypothesis within a particular domain at a time. For the moment we can conceive of the process as one of verification. The relationship of hypotheses and records to conscious percepts can be summarized as follows. (a) We choose at what level to be conscious. (b) This involves the parallel testing of a subset of the activated perceptual hypotheses at the chosen level against appropriate records. (c) One hypothesis will be selected as a result of this process partly on grounds pertaining to the hypotheses (e.g., expectancy, frequency), partly on grounds pertaining to the records, i.e., what will account for most data in the record, and partly on grounds pertaining to both, i.e., highest possible level of description. (d) At any moment what we are aware of is that hypothesis instantiated by the fit of data in the relevant record. (e) We are unaware of hypotheses tested but not verified or insufficiently verified. (f) Equally, both records and results remain unconscious; it is only records recovered by a unitizing hypothesis that are conscious. (g) We are unaware of the processes by which hypotheses are chosen for testing and by which they are tested. (g) Consequent upon the selection of one perceptual hypothesis, other competing hypotheses will receive inhibition. Note that inhibition is a concomitant of selection, rather than being the mechanism of selection (as, for example, in Shallices 1978 model). 4. If a hypothesis is to be matched against the relevant sensory data, then that data has to be retrieved. This process will be termed Recovery of information. Information is recovered from the records of sensory analysis. This notion captures the idea that conscious experiences is a late

r If a perceptual hypothesis needs to be matched against the records of sensory analysis, it might seem that we could not be conscious of dreams, images, or hallucinations which have no sensory source. First, we can suppose that the activation of hypotheses can in turn activate, in top-down manner, mechanisms of sensory analysis not already driven by the environment (Neisser, 1970). Second, it is of interest that the specific sensory aspects of internally produced images are phenomenologically not well particularized and are unstable. Thus records at the appropriate level (the criteria1 features of a perceptual hypothesis) would be produced and recoverable, but not those at lower or more analytic levels.

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stage and that the ability to consider, or base actions on, some aspects rather than others of events is selective. Thus when ones consciousness is focused on either the meaning or the sound of an utterance, perceptual hypotheses are produced equally regarding both but recovery will be primarily of one. The process of recovery will be dealt with in greater detail later on, but two points should be mentioned now. First, perceptual hypotheses, which form the contents of consciousness will be in discrete terms and in terms of objects or properties. They are segmentations of the world. That is, they are accounts of the world or of experience in terms of structural descriptions (Palmer, 1977), and at the level of the object domain (Clowes, 1971). There is little to suggest that this is a pervasive aspect of perceptual analysis itself. Therefore a central aspect of the process of recovery is that it parses the contents of records. Further, since perceptual hypotheses may account for only part of the information in the appropriate record, recovery serves to articulate the record into a structured subset of the possibilities which are simultaneously present. This structured subset is what becomes conscious. That the process of becoming conscious is one of organization will be central to our understanding of masking discussed below. Second, while perceptual analysis proceeds in the direction of more derived descriptions, recovery works in the opposite direction, it being harder to recover those descriptive records which are more analytic or closer to the proximal stimulus. The view advanced here is that phenomenal experience is an attempt to make sense of as much data as possible at the highest or most functionally useful level possible. Learning and development push our consciousness to ever higher levels. Thus as we learn to interpret the significance of a cue or combination of cues, we are aware of that significance instead of and before we are aware of the cues. The present point of this is that the nearer the attended level of representation is to that level at which we normally operate functionally, the easier it is to recover. That is, deciding what word was spoken is easier than deciding what phoneme was spoken, because the former is nearer to the semantic and pragmatic levels of representation. In addition, although automatic representation of a higher level is only achieved after that of a lower level, by being derived from it, nonetheless since this happens before any recovery operation, recovery of lower level information is necessarily influenced by any higher levels of representation that have been achieved. 5. A further essential aspect of the process of recovery necessary to instantiate perceptual hypotheses is that of the Synthesis of the records of more than one specialist processor. Integration of different types of information is necessary for several reasons. First, as noted above, if the

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output of lexical analysis gives rise to a hypothesis at the lexical level, confirmation cannot be by recovery of a lexical record alone; at least the record of the sensory form or source of such a description is necessary. Otherwise one could not say I saw such a word as opposed to I heard such a word. Thus to have a particular sensory experience (visual, auditory, etc.) requires records of at least two levels of analysis. Second, in the visual domain at least both form and location are required to articulate the visual field in terms of objects. Third, without integration of different types of information, our percepts would not have the phenomenal unity that they do usually have. That is, normally we are not aware separately of a certain color, a particular shape, a texture, and the idea of a table, each located at a particular point in space, but of one thing: a-table-ofa-certain-color-and-wood-oriented-in-a-particular-way-at-a-certain-location-and-distance. Recovery alone of feature values will suffice for awareness, but will not be sufficient for normal unitary percepts. If synthesis does not operate normally and at the appropriate level, a person will be quite aware but their percepts will lack appropriate unity. (It is proposed in the clinical section below, that cases of disjunctive agnosia exemplify such an impairment.) Synthesis could be carried out on two (logically distinct) bases. (a) Individual properties of the optic array are represented in records, at each level of description, with reference to a spatial map. (b) Perceptual hypotheses not only specify their features (whose values are instantiated by data in the records), but also specify the structural relations between all their features. When a hypothesis is verified the structural relations in the hypothesis permit the appropriate binding together of the features in a structure. Both the features of objects and the objects in a scene are plausibly related one to another by structural descriptions at each level. The feature values (e.g., color, texture) are plausibly related to each feature by a spatial map of their origin in the array. Thus, the instantiation of a perceptual hypothesis involves the use of hypotheses as frameworks to both recover and synthesize the information specified by that hypothesis. 6. A synthesized percept is obviously not unitary to the extent of the simultaneous conscious embodiment of all aspects or levels of information whose representations have been achieved by perceptual processors. This is in contrast to Allports (1977) claim that it is. We can and do retrieve the records of only some of the processors. We choose to attend to alternative levels or aspects of events. 7. The processes of Recovery and Synthesis are related to three aspects of consciousness: Awareness, Unity, and Selectivity. Recovery of information is necessary and sufficient for awareness. Synthesis, which depends on recovery, is necessary for attribution of a percept to a source

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and for the unitary nature of the percept. Selective recovery of information is what underlies both the level or aspect of our awareness and our ability to set up or choose which aspect of what we perceive will control categories of behavior. Thus selective recovery enables us to decide (a) whether or not two letters are the same graphically (AA) or graphemically (Aa) (level of awareness), or (b) whether or not two letters are the same size versus the same color (aspect of awareness). This relates to the logical requirements of tasks or the categorical status of an act rather than its analog aspects (speed and manner of execution). 8. The foregoing has covered the bones of the present proposal and is illustrated in its barest information-processing form in Fig. 4. The view presented here is in contrast to that of authors such as Deutsch and Deutsch (1963), Dixon (1971), or Shallice (1972, 1978) who have treated the transfer from preconscious to conscious perception primarily as a matter of strength of activation. This is not only because the results of Experiment 5 of the preceding paper seem to militate against strength as a sufficient criterion. The other main reasons are that it will permit (a) treatment of qualitative differences between conscious and nonconscious representations, and (b) a principled treatment of otherwise paradoxical perceptual phenomena. The present emphasis on qualitative differences also differentiates this from the views of Lashley (1958), Miller (1962), and Mandler (1975). These authors are careful to say that mental processes are not part of consciousness, but that the results of mental processes are what are conscious. Implicitly, according to all the above-mentioned authors, all that can be represented consciously is represented in the same fashion nonconsciously, and therefore becoming conscious of something is merely like opening a door to, or it being pushed by, one aspiring entrant. According to the present view phenomenal experience is an attempt to make sense of as much data as possible at the most useful level, according to culturally given presuppositions, and therefore it involves a further, inferential step.
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS PROCESSES AND REPRESENTATIONS

In the outline of the approach so far, the main difference mentioned between conscious and unconscious processes has been automaticity versus selective intentionality. The distinctions between the two classes of perceptual processes can be further elaborated. However, the importance of discussing such distinctions is not merely elaborative. Certain types of putative differences have implications for the nature of the processes of recovery and synthesis. This is why this section precedes a more detailed exposition of those processes.

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of proposed position. This represents (a) the distinction between automatically yielded representations and those of which we are conscious, and (b) the course from (i) nonconscious representations to (ii) perceptual hypotheses to (iii) recovery to (iv) verification of hypotheses to (v) synthesis of information in a conscious percept.

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While unconscious automatic processes are not bound by capacity, those associated with consciousness are. Recovery of different types of information and decisions based on different types of information are restricted in their temporal parallelism. Thus Treismans recent work on the limited capacity of different perceptual decisions (Treisman, Sykes, & Gelade, 1977) and Marcels earlier findings on within-channel seriality (Marcel, 1970) refer to limitations on recovery rather than initial processing. In both these studies subjects were relatively unlimited in dealing simultaneously with stimulus dimensions per se (color or shape) but were limited in their ability to deal with conjunctions of dimensional values (a red circle or a green square). A further indication of representational capacity is provided by the present authors work on polysemous words (Marcel, 1980). Apparently more than one interpretation of an event in any one domain can be represented simultaneously nonconsciously but only one interpretation at a time can be represented consciously. In the lexical-semantic case investigated by Marcel this applied to the meanings of words such as PALM. However, this principle also applies to more perceptual domains. Thus if a Necker cube is seen as a cube then consciously it can only be seen in one orientation at a time. However, prior to that stage of perceptual synthesis not only can it be represented in both orientations simultaneously, but each corner can be represented as both concave and convex. This can also be seen to apply to lexical segmentations of auditory streams. The acoustic pattern phonetically represented as [wetta] will be automatically segmented by a British listener into both waiter and way to at an unconscious level, but only one lexical structuring of it can be represented at one time consciously. This difference in capacity applies not only to representation of a single event but to the processing and representation of simultaneous events. While we can only recover information from one speech stream at a time, the experiments of Lewis (1970) and Corteen and Wood (1972) suggest that simultaneous analysis of different streams proceeds automatically to at least a lexical level. In the visual case evidence has been provided by Bradshaw (1974), Underwood (1976) and Willows and Mackinnon (1973) that words which cannot be reported are analyzed simultaneously with attended material. Indeed in order to produce the very initial determination of eye movements as reported by Yarbus (1968) and Mackworth and Bruner (1970), different segments of the visual field must be simultaneously analyzed to high levels of interpretation prior to allocation of attention.
Intention and Znhibition

A second distinction, which is often theoretically coextensive with the terms conscious and nonconscious, is between intentional and noninten-

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tional processes. The problem is that while commonsense theorizing is based on the distinction, what is needed is an operational criterion and qualitative differences consequent upon it. However, it is possible to find phenomena which fulfill these criteria. One such is lexical/semantic priming. It would appear that trial-to-trial facilitation can be determined both by an intentional process and unintentionally. Tweedy, Lapinski, and Schvaneveldt (1977) have shown that the extent of facilitative semantic effects by prior context in lexical decision are dependent on the proportion of successive pairs of semantically related words. On the other hand, Fischler (1977) has shown that associative effects occur in this situation without any prior expectation of an associated pair. The crucial difference is suggested by an ingenious experiment by Neely (1977). His results strongly indicate two types of contextual effects consistent with the theory delineated by Posner and Snyder (1975). The first is a fast, automatic inhibitionless spread of activation to semantically associated lexical entries, which proceeds independently of a subjects expectancies, intention, or control. The second is a slow effect which depends upon the subjects intention and conscious awareness and which can be focused at will on arbitrarily defined sets of lexical entries but which involves the generation of inhibition to those entries unrelated to those on which it is focused. Interestingly enough this formulation, especially the dependence of inhibition on consciousness exactly fits Marcels (1980) findings with polysemous words. When PALM was masked to prevent consciousness it facilitated lexical classification of WRIST whether it was preceded by HAND or TREE. But when PALM was not masked and the subject was conscious of it, it had an inhibitory effect on classification of WRIST when preceded by TREE. Indeed Posner and Snyders theory of conscious inhibition supported by Neelys data would account for one aspect of the results in the present Experiment 3 (Marcel, 1983). When subjects were aware of the word stimulus there was a greater development of interference relative to facilitative effects with longer word-color intervals than when they were not aware of it. While the foregoing has attempted to instantiate the association of intention and nonintention with conscious and unconscious, it is plain that what is initiated consciously is realized in large part nonconsciously. Thus while the present position (Posner & Klein, 1973; Marcel, 1980) argues that inhibition is a concomitant of conscious intention, it operates at a nonconscious level. In the case of action, inhibition is not only generated in the selection of intended, voluntary actions, but operates in the modulation of that postural and motor control which, though serving as a supportive background, is not the focus of intended or consciously regulated behavior (Turvey, 1977a). Carr and Bacharach (1976) have pointed to the counterpart of this in perceptual mechanisms. Thus there are two sources of both activation and inhibition. Firstly, in perceptual analysis

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prior to consciousness several entries may be activated either by separate sources or by association without inhibition. At the stage of consciousness or focal attention unsuccessful competitors for spatial attention and for the representation of any one spatial source will receive inhibition. Secondly, in postconscious intentional processes such as search of lexical, semantic, or other representational memory systems, activation entailed by the focusing of conscious attention itself entails inhibition of nonattended categories. In essence, the line taken here is to associate inhibition only with those processes whose issue is constrained to be selective. Selective bounds are put on actions to the extent of their coherence and biomechanical constraints. They are put on conscious perception to the extent of its coherence and limited capacity. To illustrate the boundaries on activation and inhibition, consider the nature of one type of error in the consciously initiated activation process of lexical selection in speech production. Let us suppose that lexical selection is driven on the basis of semantic and syntactic specification and results in phonological output. If we ignore those speech errors which result from the context of the rest of the utterance (e.g., anticipations, perseverations, transpositions) one of the predominant classes of error is that of blends of two potential candidates. Examples from Fromkin (1973, Appendix U) include momentaneous (instantaneous/momentary), herrible (terrible/horrible), smever (smart/clever). In some sense utterance of a word is selective or categorical by force of structural constraints-we cannot utter two words at the same time. Now to a certain extent the existence of blend errors of the type exemplified is an example of failure of inhibition. But then the intended activation is of something which satisfies the semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic requirements, and in the cases listed in Fromkins corpus both of the lexical entries leading to the blend in all cases satisfy those requirements. What one does not obtain in blend errors is (a) the intrusion of semantically unrelated words, or (b) substitution of segments related only phonologically (unaffected by surrounding context). Indeed the only case where these two other sources of intrusion appear to contribute to blends is in jargon aphasia. When they do it appears either due to lack of inhibition or relaxation of inhibition (Butterworth, 1979). Thus, the existence of blends due to one source (semantic activation) and the normal nonexistence of other sources (inhibition of lexical segments related only phonologically) is a demonstration of categorically defined activation and categorically defined inhibition.
Representational Categories

The preceding discussion of associative activation and concomitant inhibition has raised the question of the boundaries of such processes. It is thus appropriate to discuss at this point another distinction between con-

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scious and unconscious processes-the form of the knowledge and representations upon which such processes operate, i.e., discriminative categories and their dimensions of coding and association. In Polanyis (1964, 1966) terms, the tacit and explicit (i.e., nonconscious and conscious) descriptions of an event may be quite different. Turvey (1974) has already made this point and presented some of the evidence which follows. Wickens (1970) has argued that release from proactive interference (PI) in short-term memory (improvement in recall performance following continuous deterioration) reveals psychological categories by dint of differences in coding between classes. In an interesting set of studies, Turvey used sets of words chosen from the different poles of each dimension of the Semantic Differential (Turvey & Fertig, 1970; Turvey, Fertig, & Kravetz, 1969). Shifting across dimensions within the same polarity did not produce release from PI; however, shifting polarity either within or between dimensions produced highly significant release from PI. Yet if people are presented with words differing in their polarity they cannot intentionally discriminate or sort them. In other words a distinction is being made tacitly or unconsciously (as revealed by release from PI) which is not being made consciously. The opposite of this is to be found with syntactic form class of words. While one can quite easily distinguish consciously between nouns and verbs, Wickens (1970) has found that a shift from one to the other has no effect in release from PI. Again, a shift from concrete to abstract and low to high imageability words fails to have any effect on PI (Wickens & Engle, 1970) while imageability is found to be an important variable in intentional learning and memory (Paivio, 1969). This difference has been echoed in the contrast between reportable word perception and unconscious registration. Marcel and Patterson (1976, 1978) found that imageability interacts with hemifield when subjects are asked to report tachistoscopically presented words (i.e., low imageability words are much harder to report at the same target-mask SOAs in the left visual field) and that imageability affects lexical decision time. However, entirely different implications were yielded in an experiment where low- and high-imageability words were masked to prevent awareness and used as primes for subsequent lexical decision words, both within and across hemilields. When thus masked and their effects measured as in Experiment 4 of the preceding paper (Marcel, 1983), there appeared to be no difference either in the representation or accessibility of high- and low-imageability words in either hemisphere nor in their efficacy in semantic priming of associates, within or across cerebral hemispheres. Something similar to the studies of release from PI can be seen in the clinical field. Warrington (1975) found that certain agnosic patients could neither read nor recognize particular words nor auditorily discriminate them from nonwords. Yet their immedi-

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ate memory span for these words with auditory presentation was signiticantly better than for the nonwords. A categorical feature affecting behavior (lexical status) was not recoverable consciously as a feature upon which to base intentional categorical discriminations. A further example is that in Lewiss (1970) experiment synonymity of unattended to attended words affected reaction time to attended words, but associative relations derived from associative norms did not. Turvey argues from this that associative norms reflect explicit cognitive dimensions but are not isomorphic with the structure of tacit knowledge. In the cases cited so far it appears that certain dimensions are relevant to the recovery of information about and conscious use of different types of verbal material, while different dimensions are relevant to their nonconscious representation, processing, and effects. It has long been claimed that radically different principles apply to conscious and nonconscious processes. A common line is that while the structure of conscious knowledge is logical, that of nonconscious knowledge is merely associative. This section while aimed at supporting a distinction, is an attempt to hint at more subtle differences.
More Radical Differences in the Codes-Implications for Recovery

The immediately preceding discussion has suggested some of the differences between conscious and unconscious representations. If these were only differences in the relative salience or availability of particular characteristics (e.g., syntactic class versus connotative features of words), then they would be elaborative but not central to the present concerns. However, certain approaches suggest that the structural languages of conscious representations are not directly mappable onto those of nonconscious representations, i.e., they are neither commensurate nor coextensive. If this is the case then either (a) what have been termed the records of the outputs of perceptual analyses are not mere copies of such outputs but translations, or (b) the process of recovery of information is not so much retrieval as the imposition of a qualitatively different structural description. The type of problems which lead to these notions can be illustrated from the realms of speech perception and visual perception. It is often assumed that the perception of speech proceeds from an acoustic description of the signal to an intervening phonetic description and thence to a syllabic or lexical description. However, certain lines of evidence from simulation suggest that the code used by lexical categorization for auditory word recognition could be in directly acoustic rather than phonemic terms (Warren, 1976; Klatt, 1979; Marcus, 1979). Another cogent argument (Oden & Massaro, 1978; Massaro & Oden, 1980) is that the smallest units capable of reliable isolated recognition are syllables, but again that syllables use acoustic and not phonemic information. Yet it is

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arguable that the analytical limit of our conscious experience of speech sounds (locutionary awareness) is restricted to phonological descriptions; and that even our ability to experience phones or phonemes rather than syllables is a special acquisition (Morais, Cary, Alegria, & Bertelson, 1979; Marcel, 1979). We just cannot auditorily experience, directly and selectively, acoustic features or segments, but have to infer them. Additionally while phonological descriptions of the speech signal may be considered abstractions of acoustic descriptions, phonological and acoustic segments of the speech signal are not coextensive. Not only do the informative acoustic segments extend over wider ranges than phonemes (Liberman, 1970, Fig. 5), but, for example in initial consonant clusters of stop+lr/, one set of acoustic cues indicates a single phoneme while others indicate two (different) phonemes (Kornfeld, 1977). As Studdert-Kennedy (1981) admits, the enterprise of trying to find a mechanism for translating the acoustic signal into phonetic segments has been given up. In fact, the possibility exists (see Marcel, 1979) that phonemic descriptions are an invention which have a phenomenological but not a processing reality, at least in sensory analysis. The problem this creates is as follows. Suppose we are listening to speech and attending to the phonemes uttered. How could we directly recover phonemes from the records of any level of speech analysis if speech analysis does not itself represent them? They are not explicitly represented in syllables, and acoustic segments are not coextensive with them and are ambiguous. The potential solution proffered by Wickelgren (1976), that phonemes could be directly derived from context-sensitive allophones, has been discredited by Massaro and Oden (1980, p. 135). The fact that we can in fact consciously attend to phonemes seems then to demand that the process of recovery is rather more complicated than simple matching. In vision, the perception of depth, motion, and shape over time provides a similar problem. Our conscious experience is in terms of separate rigid bodies describable in terms of static metric Euclidean geometry. Yet the ligural invariances of the environment with respect to viewpoint, depth, and motion are more economically described by nonmetric projective geometry (Johansson, 1974; Shaw & Pittenger, 1977). While projective geometry is theoretically mappable onto Euclidean geometry, enormous problems have remained throughout attempts over the last century to account in Euclidean terms for visual processing itself of space. Thus Western conventions of pictorial representation, especially those traceable to the Renaissance (e.g., the use of linear perspective to represent a single visual moment from a single retinotopic viewpoint), can be seen as making explicit the analytic limits of our visual awareness (in the same sense as locutionary awareness) rather than representing the language of the visual system. This is an extremely important point which will be

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taken up in the next section. First it allows us to specify the appropriate domains of discourse for on the one hand physical% and biological descriptive metrics and on the other hand cognitive descriptive metrics. Second, if valid, it sets severe limitations on the ability of psychophysics, which relies on phenomenally based judgments, to reveal the nature of sensory systems. However, the important point here is that if the geometry of visual processing is qualitatively different from that of phenomenal visual experience, recovery cannot be a simple matching process.
THE PROCESSOFRECOVERY Recovery and Verification

If the languages of conscious experience are often categorically different from those yielded by sensory analysis, as suggested in the last section, how are the two related in the process of recovery and verification? In the section outlining the current approach, verification was described as an attempt to relate perceptual hypotheses to their counterparts in the records. As such it could be viewed as a simple parallel search and comparison process (i.e., for hypotheses of Level/Type A, Is Hypothesis Aj contained in Record Ai . ? where i . . . IZ defines a spatio-temporal extent). However, comparisons are only valid if what are compared are in the same or compatible codes. Since the previous section suggests that it is probable that the codes are not directly mappable, the conception of the verification and recovery process needs modification. One approach to this problem is to take seriously the notion of conscious experience as an account, an attempt to make sense of as much data as possible in terms consonant with our beliefs. This view has been applied to various areas of experience-perceptual illusions (Gregory, 1970), emotional experience (Schachter, 1973, experience and use of language (Campbell, 1979). In applying this view to the process of verifying perceptual hypotheses against recovered information, the most appropriate metaphor for a mechanism is Piagets notion of Assimilation (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969), whereby the environment is understood in terms of our internal schemata. Moore and Newell (1974) present one of the few attempts to realize computationally a mechanism of assimilation which does not finesse or trivialize the issue of incongruent languages. The program (MERLIN) achieves an interpretation of the external language by trying to view the external language in various ways, noting what entities have been attempted but failed to match. Supposing equivalence between such entities, it attempts to see if other entities will be mappable with relaxed equivalence criteria. It attempts to impose ever more abstract schemata onto entities in the external language, each time withholding equivalence criteria for certain entities or segments of the

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/ /I

/ / // / / ,/

/R _ - Giii$r-&, \

I:, 1

FIG. 5. The process of verifying perceptual hypotheses against recovered information. Where codes are not compatible, verification is represented as assimilation by inferential problem solving.

external language, until a satisfactory range of the external data can be accounted for. The equivalences postulated by the accepted account but not yet strictly verified will then be accepted. The mechanism described by Moore and Newell (1974) seems an appropriate way of viewing the process of accessing and handling the records of sensory analysis for the purpose of synthesis into a unitary percept. Note that the question asked in the verification process is now in terms of criterial matches of the form Can anything be found in Record Ai ,, which can be taken to support hypothesis a, X, and if so which hypothesis can be best supported? (preference being given to higher level or more encompassing hypotheses). This is captured rather crudely in Fig. 5. Constraints on Recovery Firstly some records are usually always inaccessible to consciousness, at least in the absence of some special training procedure. For example it is arguable that we can never base categorical actions on the most peripheral processes contributing to form analysis, nor may it be possible to attend directly to acoustic features of speech. Secondly such records have very limited lives. Their duration may differ according to their type or other factors. Thirdly it is easier and possibly quicker to recover information from a higher level than from a lower level. As we learn to interpret the significance of a cue or a combination of cues, we are aware of that significance instead of and before we are aware of the cues. We hear words not phonemes and their coarticulation. To use an example of

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Polanyis (1966), when we are exploring the interior of a hole with a stick we are aware of the shape of the hole not the pressures of the stick on our hand, although the former is mediated by the latter. In a general sense the level of our consciousness is pushed to the level of whatever representations we learn, and the nearer the level of the attended representation to the level at which we operate functionally, the easier it is to recover. This relation between ease of recovery and level of representation goes toward an account not only of the order of dropout of the three types of decision in Experiment 1 of the preceding experimental paper but also of phenomena such as the Word Superiority Effect and the influence of higher order factors in phoneme monitoring. This will be discussed below in the section on reinterpretation of such phenomena. Fourthly, where multiple representations are yielded in any one domain, for a particular time or spatial location, then only one can be recovered at a time. In audition two words may have been uttered by different speakers, or one acoustic pattern may be structured into different phonemic or morphemic segments (e.g., [werta] can become either waiter or way to for a British listener). In vision different patterns may be projected on to spatially equivalent parts of the two retinae or one pattern can be structured in two ways (e.g., a Necker cube). Examples at the semantic level are polysemous words (race) and at the syntactic level polysyntactic phrases (they are flying planes). In any domain nonconscious processes will yield all possible representations. But for any domain only one value can be recovered at a time for a particular point in the appropriate multidimensional space. The source of this boundary on recovery is in the contrast between the relatively unlimited processing and representational capacities of nonconscious systems and the relatively limited processing and representational capacities of conscious systems. Intimately related to the foregoing is the nature of the codes which are synthesized. For example suppose one is attempting to recover the letters of a letter string. If a lexical code is available (i.e., if they form a known word) then that is more economical than a purely graphemic code. Thus given the capacities of consciousness, as revealed for example by studies of short-term or working memory, more graphemic information can be recovered if the graphemic record can be synthesized or matched with a lexical record than if not. In general more lower level information can be recovered the more economical a code it can be synthesized with. Indeed, a point that is depicted in Fig. 4 is that records of more analytic representations can be addressed via records of representations derived from them, but not vice versa. To put this in a slightly different way, those things of which we are conscious are structural descriptions. While perceptual processors may work on data which is at the level of nonparsed elements, the perceptual hypotheses which constitute consciousness and which are matched to

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recovered information are always structural descriptions which correspond to parsings of elements. This idea is essentially the view put forward by Hochberg (1970). Thus the capacity constraints on recovery are not due to the number of elements that can be handled but due to the fact that only one structure can be used at a time as a synthesizing principle for recovery. In this sense perceptual spans reflect the level and economy of organizations imposable on records. However, this aspect of recovery carries with it another constraint, which will be used to explain masking and is more fully explored in that section below. Since what is used to recover information is a structural description, what recovery does is to impose a parsing on that which is in a record. The first aspect of this is segmentation of a record. It is supposed that there is an upper bound on the number of independent segments that can be recovered which are not themselves linked by a superordinate structural description. The second aspect is that for whatever is treated as a single segment, its constituent elements will not at the same time be recoverable as discrete entities. Thus, while perceptual hypotheses, which guide recovery, attempt to account for as much data (elements) as possible in any spatially or temporally delimited portion of the record, they will often not account for all data therein. Therefore by its very nature, the process of recovery gives privilege to certain elements of the record in attaining conscious status to the detriment of the remaining elements. Lastly, recovery is bounded by interference. If a result of processing has not yet been recovered to become a conscious percept, then its replacement in space or time in the record of that process will prevent such recovery. This is the proper application of Kolers (1962) clerk-customer analogy. In Kolers analogy a clerk who is asking a customer certain questions may be hurried or disturbed by a subsequent customer. But this limited-capacity, distractible clerk is not a mechanism which analyzes or transforms information (as in Turveys, 1973, use of the analogy) but a mechanism which recovers information. This again relates directly to masking which will be discussed below.
CENTRAL MASKING AS A STRUCTURAL ASPECT OF RECOVERY

The purpose of this and the following two sections is to clarify the present approach by applying it to specific phenomena. This section presents a functional approach to central visual masking in terms of phenomenological goals. Specifically, empirical characteristics of central masking will be examined as illustrations of the principle of structural organization and of other constraints on recovery.

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Masking refers to those situations where the presence of one stimulus impairs the perception of another stimulus in close temporal and/or spatial proximity. Although several considerations make it difficult to define the realm of discourse with regard to specific masking procedures, one broad distinction will be made. Turvey (1973) distinguished between peripheral and central visual masking. The former is only obtainable if the two stimuli are presented to the same eye, it is a function of the energy relations between the stimuli, and it works in both a forward and backward manner. The latter is obtainable whether the stimuli are presented to the same or different eyes, it is a function of stimulus-onset asynchrony, it tends to work in a backward manner (the latter stimulus masks the earlier), and it requires some structural similarity of pattern between the two stimuli. Energy masking is here assumed to impoverish the information which automatic preconscious sensory processes use. Thus it precludes any results being produced by earlier processors of sufficient definition to be further transformed. In the case of central pattern masking, it will be assumed that preconscious processing is unaffected and that the masking interaction interferes with some aspect of the achievement of a conscious percept.
An Approach to Central Masking

Before describing the proposed conception it is appropriate to present data which strain the credibility of current approaches and which will be returned to as exemplifying the principles of the proposal. Current approaches assume that central masking interferes with or terminates processing at the level of visual analysis. Various kinds of evidence already suggest otherwise. These types of data need integtating into an approach to masking. Firstly there is the work by Dember and Purcell (1967), which has been replicated and extended by Kristofferson, Galloway, and Hanson (1979). In these studies identification of a target letter is impaired when followed at certain SOAs by a mask, but when the mask itself is masked by metacontrast by a subsequent stimulus then identification of the target is recovered. (Note that here we are not talking about recovery under peripheral or brightness masking as in Dember, Schwartz, and Kocaks (1978) or Turveys (1973) studies.) Either target-mask interactions and stimulus identification do not occur until much later than single-mask experiments would lead us to expect, or masking does not interfere with or terminate visual analysis itself. A second phenomenon which is consistent with the latter idea is that reported by Schultz and Eriksen (1977). In this case the target was one of four digits, discriminable

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and recognizable but with incomplete contour strokes. Forward and backward masks were (a) enhancing-i.e., included elements which replaced the segments missing in the appropriate target, (b) confusing -i.e., included elements missing from another target, thereby decreasing discriminability, or (c) noise-i.e., containing random elements. As IS1 decreased, relative to a no-masking condition the enhancement mask facilitated target recognition, while the other two masks impaired recognition. Plainly the masks cannot have been interfering with the visual analysis of the targets. Evidence of a different, quite dramatic kind has been provided by Jacobson, in studies which went a long way to meeting methodological objections to his earlier (1973) experiments (1974; Jacobson & Rhinelander, 1978). He showed that while longer SOAs are needed to preserve verbal identification of masked words as the masks become graphically, graphemically, and lexically more similar to the targets, much shorter SOAs can be tolerated when the mask is a word semantically associated with the target than when it is not. If the mask had impaired or preempted visual analysis itself, which must precede lexical representation, there could be no lexical-semantic interactions between target and mask. Of course the experiments presented in the preceding paper (Marcel, 1983) provide perhaps the most substantial evidence. Words masked so that they cannot even be detected show effects of lexical characteristics derived from their visual form on other words. The present approach to central masking addresses itself to two questions. (1) What effect does masking have? (2) What principles govern whether two stimuli will interact to produce masking or some other effect? As will be seen, these two questions are not independent. However, regarding the first, one effect of masking under special conditions is to interfere with recovery of certain spatial, temporal, or other physical elements of one or more of the records of the results of sensory processing, as discrete segments. Depending on the nature of target-mask relationships, masking may preclude awareness at all of a certain source of information, or within that source of information may preclude recovery of different levels or types of information (location, color, identity). Without segmentable evidence of particular form or of particular location, the separate existence of an environmental event or aspect cannot be acknowledged or experienced. Less severely, a high-level aspect (identity, meaning) may be recoverable, but not lower level aspects (location, form). These lower level characteristics are the more variable (or episodic) aspects of events, and the performance of many perceptual tasks (reporting from brief visual presentations on the basis of form, color, or location) depends on the synthesis of recovered information at high and low levels.

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This leads to the second question. To approach the principles of interaction which govern what is available to consciousness, it is necessary to return to the principles of phenomenal experience and of recovery suggested earlier. Phenomenal experience is intensional, in that what we perceive are objects and patterns in space, and events and episodes in time. The aim of recovery and synthesis is to make sense of or account for as much data as possible in the above terms, i.e., event perception; and what is used to recover data from records is a structural description, i.e., phenomenal experience is a parsing of the records. Events are restricted portions of space and time (Cutting, 1981). When objectively separate events are treated as in the same portion of space/time, only a single event can be consciously perceived, since only one structural description can be chosen at a time for a particular space/time segment. With regard to what is recovered, it was suggested that higher level descriptions are chosen if possible (i.e., are more accessible to recovery), and that economy of available description will govern amount recoverable. Let us now make these general remarks rather more specific. To begin with, let us suppose that what governs whether two events will be in an interactive relationship at all is whether they are treated as being within the same parsed segment of a structural description or not. An extremely good illustration of this notion is provided by Bregman and Rudnicky (1975) in the auditory domain. A portion of a repeatedly cycled signal stream consisted of the four tones XABX, where X was of lower frequency than A and B and the tones before and after the Xs were lower still. The listeners task, to identify the order of A and B, was made difftcult by the flanking Xs. But by moving the surrounding tones nearer to the frequency of the Xs, the Xs were captured, leaving A and B in a subjective stream of their own and making their order easier to identify. Consider the studies of central visual masking by Dember et al. (1967) and Kristofferson et al., (1979) described above. When all that is presented is a target and mask, then provided they are within certain limits of temporal separation, nothing acts to prevent their being treated as belonging to the same structural unit. But if a further event occurs, it is possible to induce an alternative temporal structuring whereby the mask and the additional event are treated within one structural unit and the target is left as an independently recoverable segment of information in a record. Recall that it is supposed that it is always much more difficult to retrieve an element of a segment, to be analytic, than it is to retrieve a whole segment. Certain aspects of metacontrast masking can be viewed in terms of adding the spatial parsing aspect of event segregation to temporal parsing. In most cases of pattern masking by structure, target and mask contours overlap in space; in metacontrast they do not but are juxtaposed (e.g.,

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where a ring masks an adjacent inner disc). Metacontrast is less effective and requires greater proximity of target and mask contours nearer to the fovea (Kolers & Rosner, 1960). Masking by overlapping structure can be seen as a more general and effective case of metacontrast which continues the relationship between contour separation and masking into the fovea. That is, the more retinally eccentric a patterns projection on the retina, the greater will be the area surrounding it in which it is susceptible to interference by confusion of its contour with that of another pattern. In terms of recovery, the relative resolution power of the fovea requires maximum spatial (and temporal?) confusability or structural ambiguity, for parsing into the same segment, and therefore masking, to occur. Support for this position is given by a study of Lehmkuhle and Fox (1980). By means of random dot stereograms the relative perceived depth planes of an inner Landolt C and an outer ring could be manipulated, where the task was to identify location of the gap in the C. When the mask appeared farther away than the target, masking declined with increasing apparent depth separation. Plausibly the inner C was more segregated as an independent spatial event or object. We must now ask what governs the recovery of events treated as belonging to the same structural unit. We will attempt to apply to masking Hochbergs (1970) organizational approach to selective attention, which supposes that the perceivers aim is to make sense of as much of a stream or image as possible. Identifying what is there involves imposing a structural description. Until this is done all that a segment consists of is a set of elements. Imposing a structural description on these elements amounts to constructing a figure, and if not all the elements are accountable in the figure this would leave a ground. (However, note that in normal Gestalt terminology both figure and ground are consciously perceived as such. Here we are referring to figure and ground in the set of elements in the nonconscious record, only the figure of which can become conscious.) Two main principles of recovery, plus a combinatorial principle are proposed to account for masking effects. (1) All other things being equal, within a temporal segment relative proximity in time (recency) or space will differentiate elements. If a subset of elements are stronger due to recency, it will be relatively privileged in being given Iigural status and capturing recovery. (Indeed recency might well be thought of as a general figural principle in the domain of time.) (2) If one set of elements corresponds to a more economical description, or to a higher level description, or to something more expected (i.e., a stronger perceptual hypothesis) then it will be relatively privileged in being granted figural status, and would require greater competition (e.g., from recency or proximity) from other candidate element sets for recovery. (3) Provided that element subsets are not too separated by factors such as time or space, then if ele-

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ments from two objectively separate event sets can be fused to produce a figure which itself provides a more economical, expected, or high-level structural description than either of the two objective element sets, then that may outweigh physical factors to achieve figural status, leaving the other elements as ground, and thus unrecovered. Do these principles apply to observed data on masking? The first notion is indeed exemplified in that in central masking the later stimulus is privileged and masks the earlier stimulus (Turvey, 1973). The nearer it is to the target in time (up to a point), the more they are in competition and the less chance will the first stimulus have of recovery. In the present terms, an interesting spatial variant of this is provided by Lehmkuhle and Foxs (1980) study, referred to above. In stereoscopic metacontrast masking where target and mask vary in their perceived depth plane, the stimulus perceived more proximally was always relatively privileged. The more perceptually proximal was the inner Landolt C, the more it evaded masking: i.e., it was more likely to be given figural status. When the outer ring was more proximal, masking stayed at its severest or became even more severe with greater relative proximity. The second organizational factor is illustrated by Jacobsons work described above and by that of Taylor and Chabot (1978). In Jacobsons experiments the higher the level or the greater economy of description applicable to the second stimulus, the greater was its power to mask the first stimulus and longer intervals were needed to render them out of competition. In Taylor and Chabots experiment, single letters, five-letter pseudowords and common five-letter words were followed by a blank flash, strings of overlapped pairs of letters, pseudowords, or words. Backward masking was more pronounced when a target was followed by a stimulus describable at the same level than when it was followed by a stimulus describable only at a lower level than itself (a word followed by a word versus a pseudoword), and masking was even more pronounced when the following stimulus was describable at a higher level than the preceding stimulus (a pseudoword followed by a word versus a pseudoword). The fact that strings of overlapped letter pairs was the most effective mask can be ascribed to its providing the most economical description as a redundantly repeated pattern. If two patterns are not sufficiently separated by physical differences in their structure (e.g., color) or recency then elements from each may be integrated in the process of recovery to form a new figure. Thus, in Schultz and Eriksens (1977) study (described above) elements of the enhancement mask were grouped as part of the contours of the target, permitting a better graphic structural description of the digits. In unpublished experiments by Creighton (Note 1) if a letter string or word is followed by another letter string or word such that only one word is

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consciously perceived, letters from approximately equivalent positions in the two were often substituted to form a new word if possible (e.g., given STEER followed by CHEAP, the percept might be SHEEP). Out of all the lexically permissible combinations of the letters, what was perceived tended to be of higher frequency or imageability. Thus various structural hypotheses may be suggested by the output of processes of perceptual analysis and the most lexically favored might be sought first in recovery of data to match it. Several phenomena which are often thought to be governed by peripheral mechanisms show equivalent effects to those above. When different patterns are presented to each eye, instead of complete binocular rivalry, one may find different elements from each combined into a new unitary percept (Treisman, 1962). Walker (1978) has already noted the similarity of binocular interactions to the central as opposed to peripheral nature of dichoptic masking indicated by Turvey (1973). But we can go further. First, simultaneous dichoptic presentation, as in both binocular rivalry procedures and stereoptical depth disparity, directly puts two element sets into one temporal segment and perceptual hypotheses will influence recovery and synthesis toward the most convenient structural combination of elements. Second, as Walker notes, information from the suppressed eye affects reports of the presentation to the dominant eye, even though nothing of the suppressed eye is conscious. Auditory analogs to these phenomena in dichotic listening have been discussed by Cutting (1976). In phonetic feature fusion, when /ba/ and /ta/ are presented to different ears, if they are not heard separately nor compete, the most frequent percepts are /da/ and /pa/, where the voicing value of one stimulus is combined with the placing value of the other. In phonological fusion, when back and rack are presented they do not fuse, but when back and lack are presented they may be heard as black. Several points are worth making about auditory fusions. First, physical parameters such as relative onset time and relative intensity affect the probability of fusion. Second, linguistic rules govern what is heard in phonological fusion: while tass + tack can yield either task or tacks, back + lack yields black but not lback. This constraint on consonant cluster order in English also affects the probability of fusion for different asynchronies when, e.g., /da/ leads /ra/ as opposed to the reverse. Third, when low-level, peripheral features fuse (waveform and acoustic features) it is by integration (e.g., for sound localization), but when high-level features fuse it is by disruption and recombination of linguistic features. This parallels exactly the distinction between peripheral and central visual masking espoused here.

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Application to Type B Masking Functions Interestingly, the current proposal deals with an aspect of masking for which it was not explicitly designed to account. This is the occurrence of Type B masking functions. If the magnitude of masking is plotted as a function of SOA, one of two types of function is generally obtained (Kolers, 1962). The Type A function is a monotonic inverse relationship between SOA and magnitude of masking effect, where maximum masking is obtained at 0 msec SOA. Type A functions are obtained with both forward and backward masking, with both noise and pattern masks, and usually when mask energy is greater than target energy (Turvey, 1973). Thus Type A functions can be associated with Peripheral masking. The Type B function is a nonmonotonic (inverted U-shaped) relationship between SOA and magnitude of masking, where maximum masking is obtained at some positive value of SOA, i.e., where mask onset lags behind target onset. Type B functions have not been obtained with noise masks but have been obtained with both nonoverlapping (metacontrast) masks (Bridgeman, 1971) and overlapping pattern masks (Purcell & Stewart, 1970; Weisstein, 1971; Turvey, 1973). They are obtainable when target energy exceeds mask energy (Turvey, 1973) and only with backward masking. They are found with both monoptic (Weisstein, 1971; Turvey, 1973) and dichoptic presentation (Weisstein, 1971). Plainly Type B functions are associated with Central masking.2 The present account of central masking deals with Type B functions as follows. As SOA is initially reduced the target and mask elements are treated with increasing probability as belonging to the same parsed temporal segment of the visual stream. The relative recency of the mask elements gives them privileged status for recovery. However, as SOA is further reduced the relative recency of the mask elements decreases, decreasingly outweighing any privilege given to the target by the targets potential level or economy of description. It is extremely important in this context that in virtually all studies obtaining Type B functions with pattern masks, the targets have been describable at higher levels or more economically than the masks. That is, the targets have typically consisted of letters, words, or some recognizable figure, while the masks have typically consisted of a nonfigural set of elements or a row of repeated
2 However, with monoptic presentation and when target energy exceeds mask energy, a U-shaped function is partially due to peripheral masking. With small SOAs the target forward masks the following mask peripherally; with increasing SOA forward masking decreases until the mask backward masks the target centrally; this in turn decreases as SOA is further increased (Turvey, 1973, Experiment XVIII).

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letters. Thus at lower SOAs, level of description of target elements will be less outweighed by, and will begin itself to outweigh, recency of mask elements in a competition for recovery. The apparent exceptions to this are when Type B functions are obtained in metacontrast, where target and mask have equal tigural properties, such as a disc and a ring. However, as Breitmeyer and Ganz (1976, pp. 3-4) point out, obtaining Type B functions in metacontrast is dependent on the measure used. They also point out that when Type B functions are obtained for form in metacontrast, it is at those SOAs that perception of motion (from target to mask) is obtained. This fits in well with the current conception, since if target and mask are adjacent and figurally compatible, the most economical description of that segment of the visual stream where they are parsed together and where relative recency begins to separate and dominate less is in terms of movement. Accounting for Masking Effects in the Preceding Paper At this point an interpretation of the masking effects in the preceding paper (Marcel, 1983) is due. Those in Experiments 3, 4, and 5 present no great problem. At certain SOAs subjects were unable to detect reliably the presence of a word preceding the mask, and yet the effects of lexical representation of that word were reliable. Since no other figural event closely preceded the word or followed the mask, the present position would suggest that in the relevant temporal portion of the graphic record, at the relevant SOAs the word and mask are parsed into the same segment and the relative recency of the mask is sufficient to grant it tigural status for recovery. This of course has no effect on the further nonconscious processing of the results of graphic analysis, which will produce priming effects. If the order of effects of SOA reduction in Experiment 1 are valid, an interpretation of them also needs to be offered. As SOA was reduced, detection suffered first, followed by graphic similarity judgments, and finally by semantic similarity judgments. (This of course was only true of one subgroup of subjects, termed passive subjects.) Before addressing this issue a comment should be made on the basis on which subjects made their responses, which Experiment 2 went some way to clarifying. In Experiment 1, since the pairs of choice stimuli varied only on the relevant dimensions, if residual graphic and semantic activation from the masked stimulus combined with that from each choice stimulus, it would produce differential activation on only the relevant dimension. If a stimulus yielding greater activation elicits an orientation response, the most similar stimulus would elicit such a response and the subject could respond on the basis of that. In Experiment 2, one member of each pair of choice stimuli was similar graphically and dissimilar semantically to the masked word

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and vice versa for the other member of the pair. Reliable judgments on each of the required dimensions were no longer able to be made even by passive subjects who had done so in Experiment 1. Therefore it appears that the passive subjects were successful in Experiment 1 not because they could be intentionally and selectively sensitive to graphic and semantic information from the masked word, but because they relied on a nonconsciously produced orientation response to the more activated choice word. An account can now be offered of the SOA effects. As SOA is lowered the first effect would be an increased probability that the records of target and mask would be treated in recovery as one event set in time, recency favoring recovery of the mask elements. This again would impair phenomenal awareness of the premask word but would leave intact nonrecovered results of its visual analysis. A following choice word of greater graphic similarity to the masked word would benefit primarily from activation of its spatial locational distribution resulting from low spatial frequency analysis (Breitmeyer & Ganz, 1976) of the masked word, and also from activation of its orthographic composition from high spatial frequency analysis of the masked word. The latter analysis would provide data for lexical processing whose resultant priming would benefit a word of greater semantic similarity. As SOA is further reduced the results of both high and low spatial frequency analysis (not their records) each becomes less temporally separate for target and mask. This will have quite different effects on information about spatial locational distribution and on information about contour structure. Locational distribution information will become decreasingly specific. However, if we posit letter specific graphemic recognition devices (cf. Selfridge, 1959), contour information from the target, even though accompanied by that from the mask, will still support a graphemic description of its letters. It would make no sense for such long-term specifications to exist for locational distributions, and so there would be no top-down process to pick out the global low-frequency shape distribution of the target from that of the mask. Thus a second stage of SOA reduction would impair the representational basis of the activation underlying graphic similarity choices, but would leave intact that of lexical processing and thus of the activation underlying semantic similarity choices. Finally, at lower SOAs, since target duration equalled SOA (and masking was binocular and not dichoptic), the increasingly greater relative mask energy and shorter SOA would lead to impairment of perceptual analyses themselves by peripheral masking. This would naturally preclude graphic processing and therefore graphemic and lexical categorization and hence any semantic effects.

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Concluding Comments on Masking Conscious experience, of a sensible unitary world, is dependent upon the ability to match hypotheses of various kinds, produced by the output of automatic perceptual processors, with the records of certain of those outputs. Central masking interferes with the recovery of that information by producing competition with it for tigural status in the to-berecovered records. The principles, enumerated above, according to which it does so follow from the intensional goal of consciousness, event perception, and are classic Gestalt principles (Koffka, 1935). However, one point of this paper is that Gestalt principles apply to phenomenal experience and not to perceptual processing itself. On the whole central masking does not affect nonconscious processes of perception nor their effects. But at severely low SOAs it is suggested that even nonenergy masking can affect some nonconscious processes, principally those relying on low spatial frequency analysis, if the masking is not dichoptic.
BREAKDOWNS IN RECOVERY AND SYNTHESIS

The current approach postulates different aspects of conscious experience and separate underlying processes. Some validation is required (a) of the distinction between these aspects of phenomenology and (b) of the distinction between these processes. In this section various normal and clinical-neuropsychological phenomena will be used to illustrate the phenomenological consequences of changes in and impairments to different aspects of the normally functioning system. For example, in postulating recovery and synthesis as separate processes, there ought to be differential consequences of breakdowns in one and not the other and of the reverse. Three phenomenological aspects of normal conscious experience have been distinguished: (a) awareness or acknowledgment of the existence of (discrete) entities or events; (b) the unitariness of percepts, where objects and scenes cohere and where appropriate dimensional values of locations or segmentations of the visual (or auditory, etc.) field are put together after independent analysis by specialist subsystems; (c) ability to selectively attend to or recover different types or levels of information about any one event or segment. The proposed underlying mechanism is that sensory analyses generate perceptual hypotheses which guide the recovery of information from records and its synthesis, and against one of which such information is verified. Broadly speaking, in terms of the proposed mechanisms, consciousness might be subject to limitations, impairments, or failures in two main areas: (a) in recovery of various levels and types of records (restrictions in accessibility, limitations in capacity, or total or near-total failure), or (b) in synthesizing recovered information.

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Each of these problems would have relatively specific consequences related to the three aspects of consciousness. In what follows we will examine normal, experimental, and clinical neuropsychological examples of the consequences of each of such limitations or failures, as permitted by the present approach. Several points should be made here. First, in the clinical cases we are not primarily concerned with functional neurophysiology, but rather with natural fractionation of intentional behavior or phenomenal experience: that is, with validation and illustration of the proposed scheme by means of dissociation. Second, what will be discussed are not so much clearcut predictions as explications of clinical and normal states in terms of the present approach. The clinical conditions mentioned are not meant to be exhaustive, only illustrative. Some disorders will be mentioned in only one modality either because of lack of appropriate data or because of space considerations. Third, due to the Identity Assumption many normal and clinical states are usually interpreted in terms of the presence, absence, or level of functioning of a structure or process, independently of the role of the agent, the conscious perceiver-actor. Many of these will here be taken to reflect aspects of consciousness and the agents ability to access the respective structures or processes in different ways. In fact some of these phenomena can be seen as functional parallels to masking effects. However, this is not meant to imply that all or even most neuropsychological disorders are primarily disorders of consciousness. Many conditions do reflect basic functioning, and were it not so the present position would be meaningless. Fourth, the interpretation of clinical syndromes here is prototypical; due to the nature of neurological impairment and neuroanatomy, pure syndromes are rare. Fifth, it is assumed that modular impairments will often not be reflected directly in behavior, but will be masked by individuals attempts to cope with impairment in order to fulfill overall pragmatic or social goals. (a) Recovery (i) Impaired recovery of lower levels. Selective access to one aspect or level of description is what underlies the ability to choose that aspect or level to control categories of behavior, i.e., what the subject is instructed to do in the vast majority of perceptual experiments. It is normally the case that we operate consciously at the highest or most functionally useful level-in language at the level of communicative pragmatics, in vision at the level of objects, egospace, and action. Donaldson (1978) has pointed out that the academic aim of Western schooling is the ability to detach ones consciousness from overall goals and determination by the outer world and to attend analytically. As she has discussed at some length, many of the difficulties encountered by children at school consist of learn-

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ing to address themselves analytically to specific aspects or low levels of representation of their own percepts and actions. One example of this (see Mattingly, 1980) is that people who perceive and produce speech adequately may nonetheless have difficulty in attending to the phonetic segmentation of speech (locutionary awareness). Though we acquire the ability to address ourselves analytically to low-level representations of our percepts, we may lose these abilities with neurological trauma. Thus Luria (1947, 1950) describes patients who are quite capable of normal speech perception and production but are unable to break a word down into its succession of sounds. Goldstein (1948) emphasizes in aphasia the breakdown of the abstract attitude (almost exactly the converse of what Donaldson describes as being acquired at school) at various levels. Thus consideration and production of isolated sounds is frequently more disturbed than their utilization in perception and production of words, and the same is so for isolated words compared to their perception or production in sentences. In vision, apperceptive object agnosics have difficulty in abstracting visual qualities from the object or cannot recognize an object out of context while they often have little difficulty dealing appropriately with the same object in context. In the sphere of action, ideomotor apraxia (Brain, 1961; Hecaen, 1972) provides examples of patients who, with no comprehension problem, can spontaneously perform complex acts but cannot produce their components to order. For example a patient who cannot comply with the request to hammer the nail into the wall, does so when asked at home to hang up a picture. In all these cases, just as in Experiment 1 of the preceding paper (Marcel, 1983), intentional access to processes and representations may break down for the nominally more simple before the more complex. But this classification from simple to complex is only appropriate in an atomistic sense. From the phenomenological point of view it is the reverse. The description of the visual array at the scene level is in fact the most accessible, as is the description of movements at the level of an action. (ii) Impaired recovery of higher levels. Developmentally, increasingly abstract or higher level ways of structuring experience will become operative as the corresponding constructs are acquired. Clinically, the unavailability of normally high-level hypotheses will lead to a lack of the experience of the meaning or value of percepts, but will leave intact the nonconscious processing of such meaning. The patient will be reduced to utilizing hypotheses at lower levels, and therefore unity per se will not be lost. (Note that we are discussing the irrecoverability of higher level descriptions. It is plausible that in the dementias these levels of representation themselves disintegrate.) Classically this description fits the associative agnosias (Lissauer, 1890). The patient appears to have an adequate phenomenal apprehension of the

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full physical or sensory structure and nature of an object or sound, but still does not appreciate what it is. This can occur in one modality at a time. The most telling experimental investigations of associative object agnosia so far are those by Warrington (Taylor & Warrington, 1971; Warrington, 1975). That this is a problem of consciousness rather than analysis itself is suggested by data in the latter paper where categories that could not be addressed consciously nevertheless appear to have affected the patients behavior. Words that could not be understood nor distinguished from pseudowords produced better immediate memory performance than the pseudowords. Unfortunately since the Identity Assumption has been tacitly and strongly held, adequate data of this type has yet to be gathered. However, there is one example where relevant data have been obtained. Aphasic patients who cannot comprehend the meaning of many words can often distinguish these words from pseudowords and read or repeat them. Thus these people appear to consciously apprehend the sensory and lexical characteristics of the words but not their semantics. Nevertheless, semantic priming effects in both visual and auditory lexical decision are obtained from those same words (Milberg & Blumstein, 1981; Blumstein, Milberg, & Shrier, in press). Thus, in Milberg and Blumsteins words, it would seem that the failure of patients to perform tasks requiring metalinguistic judgments or conscious semantic decisions reflects a deficit in accessing and operating on semantic properties of the lexicon and not an impairment in the underlying organization of the semantic system used. (1981, p. 381) It is pertinent to the present analysis in terms of recovery that Goldstein (1948) and Hecaen (1972) note that in such cases an objects identity or significance may be lost only to intentional experience, e.g., deliberate attempts to comment on it or respond on its basis during testing. Its significance may still be operative in the normal course of events when the patient is not attending to it. It is difficult to find corresponding phenomena in normal people precisely because our consciousness is normally directed at higher levels of representation. However, when the processes which yield higher levels of representation are not fully automated we may see the equivalent. For example the less skilled reader in devoting more attention to coding processes may lose consciousness of the meaning. Another example may be semantic satiation, where repetition of a word leaves intact consciousness of its physical aspects, which may even lose their coherence, but prevents apprehension of its meaning or lexical unity. It is arguable, though highly speculative, that in studies of masking such as those by Jacobson (1974, 1978) the additional interfering effects of a mask having the same lexical status as the target derive from interference with

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recovery of records of lexical analysis of the target over and above those of specific graphic features. (iii) Capacity limitations on recovery or ver$cation. A plausible reflection of normal capacity limitations is the initially rapid rate of gain of information from briefly exposed displays dependent on the SOA before a mask (Sperling, 1963; Merikle, Coltheart, & Lowe, 1971). Clinical manifestation of abnormal limitation is to be found in one variety of simultanagnosia, where the patient seems to have highly spatially restricted attention. In a scene, objects and regions can clearly be parsed and synthesized but only one achieves consciousness at a time. As a typical example, Wolpert (1924) reported a patient who when confronted with a picture of a dog crossing a street described the scene as Its a dog. Kinsbourne and Warrington (1962, 1963) have shown that such patients have a particularly limited rate of gain of information from tachistoscopic displays. Another clinical manifestation of a limit on recovery, more severe, is plausibly provided by cases of sensory extinction or inattention (Bender, 1952). When a single visual stimulus is presented in either visual hemifield the patient demonstrates awareness of it. However, if the two are bilaterally displayed simultaneously the patient only demonstrates awareness of that on one (consistent) side, denying the others presence. The same phenomenon exists for audition, touch, and other sense modalities, though whether it concerns side of body or of space is unclear. Strikingly, if patients are forced to make same-different judgments, e.g., with words or pictures, much as they find the task nonsensical, they perform at 88-100% accuracy (Volpe, Ledoux, & Gazzaniga, 1979). Clearly the nonconscious stimulus has been processed, yet it seems as if a permanent (lateral) bias in recovery is operating, where a particular description can only be used to recover one exemplar in the record at a time and, if there is competition, one side is privileged. (iv) General failure ofrecovery. The most serious and dramatic impairment to recovery will be failure to recover at all. If we cannot recover any of the records pertaining to physical aspects of a discrete event then we would have no basis for acknowledging its presence. If we cannot recover records of physical qualities at all, the approach outlined here suggests that we would have no awareness within the relevant modality. Patients with damage to the geniculostriate visual pathways exhibit cortical blindness (most often restricted to one hemisphere and therefore the blindness is hemianopic, restricted to one hemifield). Such patients are phenomenologically blind in the scotomatous area, at least for static visual arrays, and cannot detect or comment on visual stimuli, yet they can localize them via eye movements (Poppel, Held & Frost, 1973) and

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pointing (Weiskrantz et al., 1974), and, while they claim to be guessing, they can grasp objects correctly and make successful forced choices in at least gross shape discriminations (Weiskrantz et al., 1974). For present purposes, it is important to draw a contrast in the interpretations of this syndrome, now known as Blindsight. It has usually been interpreted in terms of a dissociation of visual function. The division drawn by Schneider (1967), Trevarthen (1968), and Humphrey (1974) is between the geniculo-occipital system (damaged in such patients) and the pulvinar-collicular (tectal) system whose cortical projections are parietal (intact in such patients). Authors have tended to associate the former with treatment of sensory qualities of parts of the optic array, enabling identification, and the latter with treatment of motion and location in terms of some map of the visual world. Thus the syndrome has been seen as a dissociation of function. However, this does not deal with the primary characteristic, which is in terms of a lack of phenomenal visual experience. In contrast one can view the problem as one of visual consciousness. In this context it is relevant to mention some current work on two such hemianopic patients by the present author and Dr. A. Wilkins (Marcel, 1982, Note 2). In addition to replicating earlier work, we have found (a) better than chance preparatory adjustments of the wrist, fingers, and arm in reaching for objects of differing shape, orientation, size, location, and distance in the blind field; (b) the ability to produce phenomenal percepts in the blind field by afterimages, if accompanied by figurally and locationally related afterimages in the sighted field; (c) most dramatically, the ability to bias the interpretation of an auditorily presented polysemous word (BANK) by a preceding 20-msec presentation of a word related to one of its meanings (RIVER/MONEY) in the blind field. These data imply that sensory qualities have indeed been analyzed but the problem is one of recovery and thus of awareness. The neuropsychological implication of this is that occipital cortex may deal not so much with analysis of sensory qualities comprising form and identity but with their recovery for awareness. Weiskrantz (1977) has tentatively extended this argument to the cortex as a whole, with special reference to memory as well as vision. With regard to memory, Squire has recently (1982) reviewed the many findings that amnesic patients demonstrate learning or retention behaviorally without being able to reflect it in their verbal reports or recognize their memories as memories. One view of this is that amnesic patients do not have (conscious or intentional) access to their memories. In terms of the present approach we can suggest that while past experience automatically and nonconsciously has its effects, the amnesic person is unable to recover the records of such experience from temporal episodes

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other than the current one. Thus the person would have no phenomenal experience of thoughts as memories, i.e., as being associated with a particular external source or temporal episode.
(b) Synthesis

It has been suggested here that synthesis is of two types. Synthesis of a particular level of description of an object with its constituent features is achieved via the specification of those features and their structural relations in the perceptual hypothesis pertaining to the object. Synthesis of the particular values of those features with the features is achieved via a spatial map. Selective impairment of or interference with the ability to synthesize unitary percepts could arise in two ways and should manifest itself in different ways. If the record of the spatial source of independently analyzed aspects of the environment is inaccessible, then individual feature values would not be able to be reallocated veridically. If higher level perceptual hypotheses are inaccessible then their constituent features could not be put together appropriately. In both cases individual features and their values would be recoverable and the perceiver would be aware of them but their integration would be impaired. Note that we are here discussing integration only relative to a single structuring opted for in the achievement of a conscious percept, and not the multiple integrations carried out nonconsciously which suggest the perceptual hypotheses in the first place. We take issue with Treisman and Gelades (1980) view that conscious attention is the only process responsible for integration. If it were, categorical percepts that depend upon feature conjunctions would not be possible nonconsciously. As the studies in the preceding paper (Marcel, 1983) and those of McCauley, Parmelee, Sperber, & Carr (1980) indicate, strokes and letters are integrated to form words and picture elements are integrated to form scenes at a nonconscious level. There are two clinical syndromes which appear to correspond to the two ways in which synthesis can break down.3 Balints syndrome (Balint, 1909; for reviews see Hecaen & Albert, 1978; Rubens, 1979) is usually characterized by the co-occurrence of several symptoms. The patient is unable to reorient their gaze at will and is also impaired in localizing visually perceived objects. These symptoms have been related

3 There are particularly diffkult problems in dealing with this area of clinical neuropsychology. First, authors disagree as to whether patients fall into one category or another. This disagreement is often due to severity of impairments and whether the impairments are unilateral or bilateral. Second, which tests are carried out differs from one study to another. So it is difftcult to decide which impairments co-occur with each other and which dissociate from others. Further, careful records of the phenomenal experience of patients, which is central here, are few.

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to a deficit in the visual representation of egocentric spatial relations. The patient also has a severe inability to perceive more than one object at a time. Luria (1959) reported a case where if a star made of two overlapping triangles was presented it was seen as a star, but when the triangles were of different colors, only one triangle was perceived. Further, something not usually examined, aspects of an object or feature dissociate phenomenally from the object, are considered one at a time, and if two objects are present may be wrongly allocated. When a woman examined by Tyler (1968) was shown a dollar bill and a cup, she saw a cup with a picture of Washington on it. Adler (1944) showed a patient two pictures of a boy with a toy boat. She denied that the boat in the two pictures was the same boat because of its different color. But when referring to the color of the boat she was actually pointing to the blue water. Rafal (personal communication) reports a patient who when shown a yellow water pitcher said that it contained lemonade, apparently misattributing the color to the liquid. The same patient, when shown colored shapes, could correctly report one dimension at a time, but when asked to report both shape and color made more than 50% errors, where one dimension was correct and the other not. It is of interest here that in such cases dissolution of the arbitrary values of objects or features co-occurs with a disturbance of the representation of space and that patients can only see one object at a time, needing a long period between successive presentations of single objects. The clinical condition which most closely approximates the dissolution of features or parts of objects is what Liepmann (1908) called disjunctive agnosia, characterized as fragmentation of representations into their elements. The phenomenal experience of visual fragmentation in a severe case is well exemplified by a patient who premorbidly had been a psychologist skilled in introspection. Extracts from the transcript of an interview with him appear in the Appendix. These extracts make it obvious that he was simultaneously aware of, able to recover, all features present in a static scene together with their correct arbitrary values, but could not put them spatially together as objects. It is worth contrasting this with Balints syndrome. In disjunctive agnosia the patient is simultaneously aware of parts of several objects and their correct values (e.g., color) but may not see the parts correctly conjoined, i.e., bits of objects are not seen at the level of objects. In Balints syndrome the patient can see objects correctly as objects but only one at a time, and the arbitrary values of each object may be incorrectly conjoined to the object. It is interesting that in the case of disjunctive agnosia, synthesis of parts of objects appears from the transcript to be aided by movement in the visual field. Psychologists of widely differing orientations (Koffka, 1935; Johansson, 1974; Turvey, 1977b) have argued that movement provides a more primary cue to segmentation of the visual world into objects than

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static information. Thus, if the top-down synthesis derived from the structural description constituting a perceptual hypothesis is not available, relative motion and parallax would serve to synthesize the elements recovered from records. Indeed, if structural descriptions of objects are not available to phenomenally segment a static scene, we might well expect other Gestalt principles of organization (e.g., common color) to phenomenally unitize the elements and that certain principles (common movement) would override others. The functional equivalent of each of these two kinds of breakdown in synthesis can be found in studies on normal people. Synthesis of arbitrary, episodic feature values has been investigated in Treismans recent work (Treisman, Sykes, and Gelade, 1977; Treisman and Gelade, 1980), using a variety of procedures. The studies suggest that allocation of values to spatially defined sources is crucial, that this process is capacity-limited and takes time, requiring serial processing of each object-defined spatial location for conjunction of the feature values, and that segments of the visual field which have not yet been attended are subject to false phenomenological conjunctions. We can thus see that the inability to consider separate feature dimensions simultaneously and the false conjunctions of these values found in Balints syndrome are plausibly an exaggeration of the normal state of affairs. In very rapid serial visual presentation to normal subjects, not only are some items not recovered but the particular values of arbitrary dimensions are often synthesized with the wrong object. In numerous studies aimed at short-term visual memory, arbitrary displays are presented briefly and viewers are asked to report selectively the objects according to color, size, etc. This requires the synthesis of object identities with their episodic features. Experimental realizations of failure to accurately synthesize constituent features are plausibly to be found in studies by Allport (1977) and Shallice and McGill (1978). In both of these studies several words were presented simultaneously followed by a pattern mask. The graphical qualities and relations between target and mask were comparable with those in my own studies (Marcel, 1983)except that the SOAs were relatively longer. In attempting to report the words, subjects tended to recombine letters and letter groups from separate words to form a different word while maintaining the correct structural location from each of the source words. Examples from Allport include the stimulus words rust and vent leading to responses runt and vest, and tab and cud leading to cab, cub, or tub. While lexical or orthographic constraints may have operated in the generation of perceptual hypotheses to determine subjects percepts or responses, one of the effects of masking was nonetheless to selectively disturb that which would allow veridical recombination of correctly identified segments. As Allport (1977) has hinted, models of visual recognition which lack such a mechanism are seriously deficient. That combination of

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the elements was veridically achieved nonconsciously is suggested by the fact that Allport found semantic effects from the presented words even though they were incorrectly synthesized consciously. The difference between these studies and disjunctive agnosia is as follows. Visual structural descriptions specified by object-level perceptual hypotheses (words) are available to the normal person but cannot be verified. Therefore the spatial segments will get combined at that level, though often wrongly. In visual disjunctive agnosics, the structural descriptions specified by object-level perceptual hypotheses are not accessible in the visual domain. Therefore in static displays the segmentable features will not get combined at that level, and will be subject to lower level principles (color, movement) for their organization.
REINTERPRETATION OF PERCEPTUAL PHENOMENA

In the introduction to the preceding experimental paper (Marcel, 1983) an indication was given of how the Assumption of Identity (between processing and the conscious representations upon which responses are based) has guided interpretations of perceptual phenomena in terms of synthetic or analytic structurings of perceptual microgenesis. In falsifying that assumption, two general principles have been adduced which will affect any reinterpretation of particular kinds of phenomena, and which should be born in mind in any attempt to experimentally address conscious or intentional processes. The first is that perceptual experience and reports and intentional responses are based on recovered information and reflect characteristics of recovery. The second is that conscious perception is a late stage: nonconscious processes and representations precede and affect conscious representation and characteristics of intentional responses. In this section, three new paradigm assumptions will be illustrated by reference to their implications for reinterpretation of perceptual phenomena: the nonidentity of processing and experience, the concept of recovery, and the effects of automatic preconscious processes. These three concepts correspond to different aspects of Figs. 3 and 4: (a) the functional separation of the records from the results of processing; (b) the role of perceptual hypotheses and the directional property of recoveryrecovery works top-down, the records of the more analytic representations can be addressed via records of those derived from them but not vice versa; (c) the automatic activational properties of unconsciously achieved descriptions.
I. Nonidentity Phenomenal of Process and Experience-Iconic Persistence Memory and

The historical core of this and the preceding paper is the phenomenon of visible persistence and the construct of short-term visual memory. In

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the introduction to the preceding paper it was mentioned that what masking has been assumed to affect is a representational stage termed iconic memory. This concept has assumed an identity between neural persistence, phenomenal visible persistence, and informational persistence after stimulus offset. Plainly the work reported in the preceding paper calls the concept into question and the ideas proposed in this paper offer an alternative approach to the relevant phenomena. Recently Coltheart (1980) has provided a searching review of this area and his conclusions are directly in line with the views here. Thus it seems most appropriate to summarize briefly his arguments; they provide a good example of the direction urged by this paper. As noted above, the three forms of evidence of visual persistence (neural, phenomenal, and informational availability) have been assumed to reflect a single variable: a decaying visual trace that (1) consists of afteractivity in the visual system, (2) is visible, and (3) is the source of visual information in experiments on decaying visual memory. Coltheart points out two fundamental properties of visible persistence which are shown in several different techniques which rely on phenomenal measures: the inverse duration effect (the longer a stimulant lasts, the shorter is its poststimulus persistence) and the inverse intensity effect (the more intense the stimulus, the briefer its persistence). He then examines neural persistence and proposes that at present it is plausible to claim that visible persistence is produced by neural persistence. However, he is guarded about this, arguing that the appropriate kind of studies correlating psychophysics and neurophysiology are sparse and insufficient. His main point, though, concerns informational persistence. This is critically defined by partial-report superiority in the method introduced by Averbath and Coriell(l961) and Sperling (1960), which led to the term iconic memory. Coltheart points out that several studies demonstrate that the duration of iconic memory or informational persistence, thus defined, is not inversely related to stimulus duration or stimulus intensity. Thus informational persistence cannot be identified with phenomenal visual persistence. So far, then, this amounts to a further important demonstration that phenomenology cannot be identified with and bears no simple relation to information processing. Coltheart makes two further proposals of interest. First, as has been reiterated throughout the present paper, he derives the implication that one cannot investigate iconic memory by tasks that require phenomenological judgments. Such direct methods tell us instead about visible persistence. Second, he speculates on an alternative conception of iconic memory to the accepted one. He proposes that setting up an iconic memory consists of temporarily attaching various forms of physical information to a permanently existing entry in the internal lexicon (or

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presumably to permanent entries in other descriptive domains). While there are differences in detail between Colthearts and my own conception, this view corresponds almost exactly to the present proposal, outlined in the section on Recovery, of the process of hypotheses, lexical or otherwise, being fitted to information of a more analytic, physical, and episodic nature recovered from the records. In the section on failures of synthesis it was pointed out that in tasks requiring partial report from brief presentations the perceivers task is to synthesize high-level perceptual hypotheses with low-level episodic feature values recovered from records. The usual arbitrariness of the features chosen (color, location, size) is a problem because they cannot be recovered via the high-level records of the identities. In addition, only one structure can be used at a time for recovery and synthesis with its constituent features anyway. Thus the limits of performance in partial report do not reflect what is represented in iconic memory and the duration of that representation, but rather reflect the limits of recovery and synthesis and the duration of various records. Note that in both Colthearts and my own version, neither (a) the hypotheses or the records themselves, nor(b) iconic memory itself are conscious. In indicating the application of his conception to perceptual phenomena, Coltheart gives explanatory force to the notion of selection from iconic memory as a late, postlexical stage. However, he leaves this largely undeveloped. The purpose of the two subsections following this is to undertake and illustrate such a development. Before proceeding, however, one classic phenomenon in the iconic memory literature seems perhaps an apparent paradox in terms of the views advanced here. Since ionic memory, as reflected by partial-report superiority, has been thought of as a sensory precategorical representation, selection from it on the basis of sensory features has been supposed possible, but not selection on the basis of postcategorical features (i.e., those derived from identification). Indeed, partial-report superiority is found for such characteristics as color and location, but not for alphanumeric class, e.g., reporting letters versus digits (Sperling, 1960; von Wright, 1968, 1972). Since the present view conceives of partial report as a postcategorical process, surely it ought to be possible to select on the basis of identity-derived category? This apparent paradox turns out not only to be superficial, but also to emphasize one of the central features of the present view. First, the fact that categorical representations have in fact been achieved by the stage usually taken to reflect iconic memory, is witnessed by the experiments reported in the preceding paper (Marcel, 1983) and that by Fowler et al. (1981). The main point, though, is that practically all the relevant experiments require report as a measure. Report relies on phenomenal percepts and it has been stressed here that

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phenomenal percepts require the recovery of records of episodic or physical characteristics, and in the case of report of identity what is required is the synthesis of such information with conceptual representations. Thus even if postcategorical representations have been achieved, we cannot expect them to be reflected in partial report if to do so exceeds the temporo-spatial capacities of synthesis and the duration of the relevant low-level records. 2. Recovery Effects Let us here attempt to make some use of the notion of recovery of information. To start with, where different classes of stimuli have appeared to be differentially easy to perceive due to a processing variable, they may in fact be differentially easy to recover. Consider such factors as the characteristics of different words (e.g., frequency, imageability), their context or their visual quality which influence either their tachistoscopic perception or processing time in, say, lexical decision. Usually effects of these variables are attributed to the input stage of lexical access. In terms of the logogen model (Morton, 1968) the effect of such variables is taken to reflect a logogens first threshold and the amount of information needed to exceed it. According to the present notions, a word may already have been identified lexically, but its ability to achieve consciousness may be affected either by its tacit or nonconscious representation in providing hypotheses for recovery or by factors affecting the recovery and veritication process. Effects of word frequency may be due not to initial access (e.g., in terms of the threshold) but to the activation properties of that lexical entry after access. Prior context in the form of lexical/semantic association could also be affecting recovery of rather than access to a lexical entry, by influencing the choice and mobilization of candidates for recovery and verification. Since it is assumed that it is initial access to the lexicon that is affected by visual degradation by noise, the fact that degradation interacts with contextual priming in lexical decision has been taken by Meyer, Schvaneveldt, and Ruddy (1975) to indicate that context too primarily affects lexical access. Suppose that degradation indeed produces a greater problem for lexical categorization since the output of graphical analysis will be suboptimal descriptions of letters, but that by dint of this the record of graphical analysis is also a suboptimal representation. If contextual activation of a lexical entry provides a lexical hypothesis or heuristic for recovery processes to use in attempting to match the graphic record, a less well-formed record will suffice. A notion amenable to this kind of interpretation is that of Holistic perception. The general idea has been that certain phenomena reflect identification of an event in a way other than from its parts and their structure or order. I know of few models of perceptual processing which could be

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instantiated computationally that would realize this notion. Two characteristics of recovery have been mentioned, however, which would produce the effects which usually motivate the notion. Firstly, it has been argued that conscious percepts usually follow the achievement of and represent the highest level of analysis possible. Lower (or component) levels of analysis are either less recoverable or irrecoverable. Secondly, given the constructive nature of conscious percepts, lower levels are often only recoverable through the higher level. We will discuss this below with regard to specific phenomena. But these principles make it unnecessary to postulate holistic perception independent of component feature analyses. As stated earlier, it may well be that representation of a higher level is only achieved after that of a lower level by being derived from it; but since this happens before any recovery operation, recovery of lower level information is necessarily influenced by higher levels of representation. This is one way in which unconscious knowledge affects conscious knowledge or perception of an event. Two specific examples of phenomena which have invited analytic hierarchical accounts of encoding are studies of phoneme monitoring and effects of wordness on letter recognition. Specific target phonemes are easier and faster to detect in higher order speech segments (e.g., words vs. nonwords) and more so when those segments are more frequent or predictable at the lexical, semantic, or syntactic levels (see Cutler & Norris, 1978, for review). Does this mean that the word is in some sense represented prior to the phoneme? Not in terms of the temporal order of automatic processing, but only in the sense that lexical and semantic codes are what are normally relevant for conscious representation. For this reason phonemes are recovered through or with the aid of lexical representation. The more activated that lexical representation is, for example by contextual priming, the more it will aid component phoneme recovery or synthesis. Indeed with regard to auditory language perception, Foss and Swinney (1973) have resolved the problem in the proposed manner by arguing that while linguistic units may be automatically identified in the order of low (component) to high (combination) levels, the order in which they can be brought into consciousness, and hence responded to, may be to an extent in reverse. Exactly the same argument applies to Wordness effects in visual letter discrimination. In Reichers (1969) and Wheelers (1970) original experiments a letter was presented in the same spatial position either as part of a word, part of a nonword composed of the same letters, or singly. It was backward pattern masked and then two probe letters were presented, above and below the critical spatial position, which could both have made a word of equal frequency in that position (e.g., if WORD had been presented then D and K could have been the choice pair). Choices were more accurate when the letter had been part of a word than otherwise.

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This does not mean that words are easier to see than nonwords (though that may be true). The appropriate point is that information about the original letters has to be recovered. At the automatic preconscious stage letters of both words and nonwords will be represented equally at the letter or graphemic stage. But letters composing a lexical address will also produce a lexical representation. That lexical representation will aid recovery of letter information both by providing a route for recovery and an economic code for their synthesis. Thus recovery is aided in finding the original letter by its lexical frame. Additionally, or alternatively, the lexical representation will automatically produce greater activation of the graphemic entries, which will provide a basis for discrimination of the correct probe. This of course is exactly parallel to the discrimination tasks of Experiment 1 in the preceding paper. This interpretation is supported by the fact that Johnston and McClelland (1973) found that the phenomenon is only obtained with backward pattern masking of the original presentation. Energy masking eradicates the effect. The arguments presented above can also account for similar nonlinguistic visual effects. A line segment is often identified better when presented as part of a drawing that looks unitary and three-dimensional (an object) than when it is part of a less coherent flat-looking design (Weisstein & Harris, 1974; Womersley, 1977). This parallels the auditory superiority of phoneme detection in words compared to nonwords and letter-identification superiority in words. Further, Williams and Weisstein (1978) have shown that a line is better identified when part of a unitary, apparently three-dimensional drawing than when presented alone. This parallels the word-letter effect discussed above. Once again, as opposed to postulating an analytic perceptual process of microgenesis, we can suppose that feature analysis precedes representation of their combination but that more economic descriptions of feature combinations (e.g., structural descriptions or descriptions in the object domain) aid in the recovery of individual component features. Another way in which preconsciously achieved representations may help recovery of information has to do with capacity bounds on recovery. It was proposed that not only does predictability facilitate recovery but that the more economical the descriptions with which information can be matched, the more can be transferred to consciousness (as manifested in working memory paradigms). This applies fairly well to those results which seem to imply the interaction of higher order effects with iconic memory. For example, Mewhort (1967) briefly presented pairs of eightletter pseudowords of either zero-order or fourth-order approximation to English, followed by a cue as to which row of letters to report. He found that the number of letters correctly reported was increased by the approximation to English, not only of the row reported, but also of the row

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not reported. According to the classic paradigm assumptions there is a problem in how what is supposed to be a precategorical store can be affected by a property of a code derived from it by later processing. It is even less plausible that such effects should accrue from a part of the precategorical representation which has not yet received any further processing. However, the account offered above of automatic processing and aids to recovery avoids such problems. If a structural description can be given to the to-be-ignored part of the display, it will help in the tigure-ground segmentation necessary to selective recovery and if the subject does start by recovering the wrong row, such recovery will be effected quicker, allowing more time for recovery of the correct row. Most importantly, conceiving of iconic memory as postcategorical eliminates the paradox and invites the above kind of approach. Biederman (1972) briefly exposed a real world scene or a jumbled version of the scene. An object was more accurately identified when part of the former than part of the latter, even when the viewer had previously been told where to look and for what. It is not clear whether this is best conceived of as a more macrocosmic exemplar of superiority effects or whether the more economical description available for the rest of the scene is responsible. But, whichever is the case, the current view of recovery makes the phenomenon less paradoxical than views of microgenesis based on the Identity Assumption. It is worth indicating just how far-reaching the implications of the notion of recovery may be for reinterpretation of perceptual mechanisms. Take the extreme case of visual acuity. On conventional assumptions all the data we have lead us to believe that visual resolution at the retinal level decreases with retinal eccentricity. Conventional interpretation of physiological data (e.g., density of innervation) is validated by psychophysical data (e.g., spatial frequency resolution, contrast sensitivity functions). Yet psychophysical data for the most part relies on intentional responses based on phenomenal impressions. Consider two anomalous phenomena. First, the meaning of unreportable words presented in the periphery apparently affects foveally presented tasks (Bradshaw, 1974; Underwood, 1980). Second, in Yarbus (1968) studies of picture scanning, an area of high interest (a human figure in a forest) but of relatively low physical contrast with the surround (in brightness, color, contour) was able to attract an eye movement from far away when areas near to it had not yet been scanned. Both of these phenomena suggest that the peripheral stimuli in question had received detailed and high-level analysis (respectively, lexical categorization and object recognition). Is it possible that our poor phenomenal perception in the periphery is a problem of recovery rather than of sensory analysis? Phenomenal clarity may be viewed as a property of figure -ground aspects of attention (see discus-

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sion of masking above), fovea1 projections being privileged. While there are good ecological reasons for attention to be normally correlated with direction of gaze, Grindley and Townsend (1968) and Posner (1980) have shown that the two can be decoupled, peripheral stimuli receiving attention and the perceptual advantages it bestows. Bouma (1970) has shown that the decrease in recognition with eccentricity interacts with the presence of stimuli flanking the target. Additionally, the separation between target and flanking stimuli which produces an equivalent degree of lateral interference appears to be a constant proportion of eccentricity. It is tempting to speculate on the similarity between this phenomenon and the relation (indicated in the discussion of masking) between metacontrast and central masking as a function of eccentricity. That is, visual eccentricity may affect phenomenal experience, via some aspect of recovery (graphical status in the record?), rather than affecting sensory analysis, and surrounding nonhomogeneities may have a similar effect to masking. This speculation may well turn out to be untenable. However, its purpose is to illustrate the status of conventional assumptions in interpreting perceptual data.
3. Effects of Preconscious Intentional Processes Identification and Activation on

The third principle which was alluded to at the beginning of this section is that properties of preconscious representations affect the later processes applied to conscious representations. One instantiation of this is how logically determined responses which are supposed to be based on a particular categorization can be affected by activation resulting from a supposedly later stage or totally irrelevant kind of coding. Remember that we have supposed that preconsciously every possible kind of descriptive analysis is carried out automatically on a stimulus and to the highest levels. In many experiments, characteristics of the response, especially latency, is taken to reflect directly the time taken by perceptual processes or by logical steps in computing the judgment. However, in many cases latency may reflect the effect of automatic unconscious processes on response retrieval or execution, rather than reflect any perceptual process. Consider the negative proximity effect in semantic memory classification (Collins & Loftus, 1975). It is is harder to say No to Is a whale a fish? than to Is a cow a fish?, supposedly because whale is stored in memory nearer to members of the set of fish, or because it shares more features with members of that set. Let us suppose that when a memory location for a stimulus is accessed it primes those other locations with which it is associated, decreasingly with associative distance or with less shared features. Those entries prime the response associated with them.

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Thus probe items near to a set boundary will prime items (and their responses) in an adjacent set more than would items far from the set boundary. This will lead to differential response interference. But note that this account does not assume that latency differences reflect time to identify the probe item or the logical processes of verification of the experimental question. It views the source of the effects as quite independent of such processes; it presupposes identification and places the effect at the stage of response. This account can also be applied to speeded binary classification of multidimensional stimuli, and same-different judgments. Reaction times are often taken to reflect the nature of perceptual judgments. Problems have been encountered since no one comparison model appears to fit (a) both positive and negative RTs, or(b) the patterns of RTs in classification with both conjunctive and disjunctive criteria (Nickerson, 1972, 1978, for review). With conjunctive criteria (Red AND circle AND large) which are equivalent to same-different judgments, different or negative RTs decrease with the number of differing features-consistent with serial self-terminating feature testing; but positive or same RTs are often considerably shorter than the longest negative RT-which is inconsistent with the above notion. This has sometimes led to the view that while negative responses are produced as described, positive responses are the result of some form of holistic identification. An alternative account views latency differences as a result of the interaction of the logical decision and effects resulting from automatic access to a high-level description of the stimulus. Suppose that, whatever the subject attempts to attend to in accordance with the task, each stimulus is automatically fully described and that this description accesses a location in a multidimensional space representing the stimulus set. Whatever the logical decision about the present stimulus, response time would inevitably be affected by the degree of priming of the competing responses to the extent of the proximity of the probes representations to those of stimuli requiring the same or different response. This makes it unnecessary to propose that positives and negatives are classified by different perceptual strategies. Instead we can say that all the perceptual processing is done alike, by automatic feature analysis yielding combinational representations, and that the relative response times to a large extent reflect processes of activation and interference following full perceptual analysis. This account in no way preempts the operation of other factors discussed by Nickerson (1978). It does cast doubt, though, on the relevance of these types of study to perceptual processes. Much the same kind of account can be given of evidence from visual search (Brand, 1971; Ingling, 1972) that the category of a character can be known before its identity. Suppose that the effect of instructions to search

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for a category is to associate a response with all members of that category (as we have assumed for classification of multidimensional stimuli). Suppose also that all items within the effective visual field are automatically fully identified nonconsciously. The response to a target item, of orientation or exclamation, will be activated, without the subject knowing which it was. The identification of an item (automatic access to its internal representation) causes activation of associated items. If all items in a category are associated with the same response, less response interference will arise from items in the visual field than when only one item from that category is so associated, especially if members of one category are stored together and separately from different categories. Thus search specifications may well affect responses rather than perception. That we may consciously know higher level aspects before specific characteristics of a target, even that a target has been found before its location, can be attributed to principles of recovery discussed earlier. What of Jonides and Gleitmans (1972) finding that exactly the same stimulus, an O, is found more efficiently among letters when it is called a zero than when an oh, and vice versa for a context of numerals? The solution is to invoke exactly the same argument as applied to other classification experiments. Whichever the target is called, the response will be associated with the lexical representation of the symbol, which is accessed automatically. The lexical representations of numerals are stored close to one another but not with letters and vice versa. Thus although the symbol 0 when encountered will access both the lexical representation of oh and zero, only one will have a response tag. It will also associatively activate other members of each set of lexical representations (letters and digits). But whichever set is being used as a context for the search will have negative or no response instructions attached to them (see Marcel, 1977), if only to avoid false hits. Thus when the symbol is called oh and is presented among letters, inhibition and response competition (respond vs withhold any response) will be generated by contextual items. When the response is associated with zero among a context of letters, inhibition cannot be passed on to the lexical entry tagged for response, since it is in a lexical set unassociated with the context items. Although the above arguments may seem tortuous and are certainly not watertight, they are meant to offer the possibility of an alternative view to that motivated by the Identity Assumption. The usual view is that response characteristics in perceptual tasks reflect the perceptual processes nominally addressed by the task. The alternative view is that the response characteristics reflect the results of other perceptual processes (the acknowledged basis of Stroop effects) or response processes themselves. If we accept that unconscious processes precede conscious ones, then at

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least it must be admitted that much of what we know so far about pattern recognition is related to those processes which convert nonconscious representations into conscious ones or to conscious processes themselves. Our methods, relying on direct tests and thus based on phenomenal percepts have afforded us little empirical insight into the initial, perhaps fundamental, perceptual processes themselves. Physiology is of little help to functional analyses. Artificial Intelligence attempts at Image Formation and Scene Analysis, although supposedly addressed to these problems, until recently (Mat-r, 1976; Marr & Nishihara, 1978a, 1978b) have been also of restricted help. To echo Turvey (1974), The Hoffding Step (Hoffding, 1891) remains very much a mystery.
CONCLUDING REMARKS

An approach has been presented to the relations between nonconscious perceptual processes and conscious experience. This approach by substituting paradigm assumptions, attempts to account for diverse phenomena in a reasonably unified fashion. While many of the constructs involved and the accounts of specific phenomena may differ little from existing constructs and accounts, the roles and emphases given to them in the general scheme are quite different. The separation enjoined in this paper raises several issues. The most immediate concerns methodology. The experiments in the preceding paper themselves provoked the suggestion that if one wants to know about those mechanisms which actually analyze and redescribe sensory data and which largely support our experience and actions, then one needs to use indirect rather than direct techniques of assessment. The present theoretical approach suggests other cautions. Reports of phenomenological experience or responses based on it will tell us about conscious percepts, but will not only be molded by our tacit belief systems (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977), they will be affected by nonconscious processes. They will also actively impede the revelation of the process of concern. Further, since it has been suggested that conscious and nonconscious representations differ qualitatively and have different effects, it may be wise even to preclude conscious awareness of the stimuli of concern by masking or equivalent procedures. Secondly, rather more attention could be devoted to consciousness per se. One reason why what has been nonconsciously perceived is not revealed by direct report, is that people attempt to base their behavior on some.notion of rationality. One does not report whatever comes into ones mind if ones task is to report what has been presented and one has no conscious visual or auditory impression. Now this leads to an interesting speculation. It might well be that both the nature of our experience and what we acknowledge as a percept are subject to our tacit belief

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systems and culturally transmitted assumptions. It has been suggested here that conscious experience is an account of evidence in terms of available perceptual hypotheses. In this sense phenomenal experience is an attribution. But attributions must have a basis for inference in a set of rules or beliefs. Our accounts tend to consistency and particular types of representations of the world (an articulated world, effable categories of experience, attribution of percepts or sensations to a source). Perhaps experience does not need to be of this nature but is so in our culture because of epistemological presuppositions. These presuppositions constitute part of what Polanyi (1964) described as tacit knowledge. Particularly good analyses of them are supplied by Abelson (1968) in the domain of implicit causal theories, and by authors discussed by Goffman (1975) in the domain of social cognition. Two phenomena are particularly relevant to the application of these concepts to the principal concerns of this paper. First, in a recent study (Rapoport, Buchsbaum, Weingartner, Zahn, Ludlow, Mikkelsen, Langer, & Bunney, 1980) the subjective effects of d-amphetamine were compared in normal children and adults and hyperactive children. Results for adults confirmed previous findings of feelings of euphoria. However, despite physiological measures, in neither group of children was this or any other particular feeling clearly observed, except for some reports of feel funny, not like myself. Robbins and Sahakian (1979) postulate that the lack of what might be assumed to be an automatic effect may in fact be due to a lack of experience in labeling emotional states: quite apart from verbalization, the child cannot have a phenomenal experience unless he or she has a construct for it. Thus it is a real possibility that autonomic processes can have no issue in phenomenal experience or in modulating even the tone of behavior unless an appropriate cognitive, phenomenological category has been acquired. That is, until a category has been acquired, processing effects cannot be parsed in terms of it either nonconsciously or consciously. The second phenomenon concerns Weiskrantz et al.s (1974) blindsight patient. When he successfully made discriminations of orientation and shape in the phenomenally blind field, they were not based on visual experience. When asked about the shape discrimination (0 vs X) he said he saw nothing but had a feeling that it was smooth or jagged. The crucial point is that after being surprised by video recordings of his own performance and reading reports of the studies, Weiskrantz reports that his patients consciously blind field as measured by perimetry has shrunk. Zihl (1981) has reported other cases where phenomenal detection, acuity, and color identification has been recovered in part of the previously blind field after practice at locating light sources. While Zihl speculates that this is due to cortical recovery, there is no

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evidence for it, and in some of the cases it seems neurologically quite improbable. Is it possible that the patients criteria for a percept have altered? The purpose of these citations is to hint at the role of cognition in determining the very kind of experience which has long been assumed by psychophysicists to be nonmediated. In conclusion, while the approach outlined here is highly speculative and remains conceptually loose and underspecified, it appears to have fairly far-reaching implications and it is hoped that it will provoke at least some reconsiderations among cognitive psychologists.
APPENDIX

Extracts from interview with patient describing some of his visual difficulties.4 Interviewer: I think you also had some difficulty in perceiving people as units. Patient: Oh, oh yes. There was a slightly different effect I think, that if I saw a complex object, such as a person, and there were several people in my field of view, I sometimes saw the different parts of the people as not, in a sense, belonging together, although . . . if a given person moved so that all the parts of him went in one direction, that would . . . tend to make him into a single object. Otherwise there was this confusion of lots of things, all of which were there, but did not seem to belong together. . . . Several of these cases of things not belonging together gave quite absurd results. For instance, I do remember one case where there was what seemed to me to be one object which was partly motor car, partly tree and partly a man in a cricket shirt. They seemed somehow to belong together. More frequently, however, a lot of things which to any ordinary viewer would be parts of the same thing were parts of different things. I: So it was essentially common movement that created these units. P: Yes. . . . I think that was perhaps the most frightening case. A common color, especially in the case of clothes . . . when there were crowds of people together for instance on the lawn or on the beach, also formed a unifying thing. . . . The effect was much more striking when a large number of objects were on the same table . . . it was not obvious what belonged to what; there were a whole lot of different things and in fact sometimes they-when one only saw a small object one could hardly say anything more than one saw a colored patch. . . . (if somebody I knew was speaking to me) . . . it sounds quite absurd but there were two distinct things. One was that so and so was speaking to me and I
4 I am grateful to Professor 0. L. Zangwill for providing interview and for allowing me to quote from it. me with the transcript of this

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I: P: I: P: I: P:

could hear and understand what he said; two, that he was standing in front of me and I could see his mouth moving, but I noticed that the mouth moving did not belong to what I heard any more than a -than one of the old talkie pictures would make sense if the voice tape had been the wrong tape for the conversation. That was absolutely quite fantastically exiciting. . . . Was this a failure to localise the source of the voice? No. No. It was as though they were two different things. They didnt belong together. Didnt belong together at all. Another example of this-one normally sees the world being made up of things. . . . If I could go back to pictures for a moment. If you looked at a picture, say in the daily paper, could you see at once what it was of? Oh no. I should add that very often looking at pictures in daily papers for instance, especially if they were rather large pictures, I had to look at different bits and found it very difficult to combine them into a whole. This was not due to the poor quality of the print. . . . It did not usually apply to portraits of single people, but if there were a number of people in the picture at the same time it was very difficult to say how many they were or what they were doing. . . . Sometimes it seemed as though I had moved my eyes unintentionally because one object would be replaced by something which in fact could be seen in another part of the visual field. . . . (discussing his present reading ability) I ought to add that even reading along a line of closely typed print . . . I very often jump from one line to another without realising that I have done so-so that I read quite convincingly the first half of one line and it seems to follow on directly, be followed directly by the second half of a compietely other line resulting in complete nonsense.
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REFERENCE

NOTES

1. Creighton, P. Word recognition, masking and consciousness. Manuscript to be submitted as Ph.D. thesis to University of Cambridge. 2. Marcel, A. J. Is cortical blindness a problem of visual consciousness or visualfunction? Paper presented at Fifth International Neuropsychology Society European Conference, Deauville, France, June 1982. (Accepted December 1, 1982)