Acta Psychologica Sinica

Abstract

Consciousness has become a challenging question in life sciences. The viewpoint that consciousness is the processing of information at various levels of awareness is being widely accepted. It is inevitable to deal with unconscious or automatic processing for explicating consciousness. The main concern is how consciousness is converted into unconsciousness, how unconsciousness is done into consciousness, and the potential brain mechanisms of the conversion, including involvements of anatomical and functional structure, synaptic connections in the neural networks and so on. The study of unconsciousness is of great benefit to untie the mystery of consciousness that has been coming into focus by contemporary neuroscience. Recent progress of the study on the mechanisms of unconscious processing was reviewed from the points of cognitive neuroscience at different levels: the cognitive profile of unconsciousness, the correlation between unconsciousness and brain structures, and the interplay of synaptic connections. Contemporary research in cognitive psychology revealed that unconscious processing could even reach semantic level, including unconscious processing of image, character and figure. In addition, unconscious processing was different from conscious processing in nature and was distributed widely across the processing system of the brain, rather than localized in any particular unit. Recently, cognitive neuroscience has got lots of findings on perceptual unconscious processing with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), positron emission tomography (PET), electroencephalogram (EEG) etc. Various regions of the brain were involved in perceptual unconscious processing. Both the higher- and lower-order cortical areas had computational power to make inferences about specific features of complex objects. The mechanism of synchronous neural activation of cortex was likely to bind together various features that belonged to each object and separate them from features of other objects. Evidence from neural networks and synapse also indicated that synchronous neural activation of the cortex was an important mechanism of information processing. Finally, some potential perspectives of how to study unconsciousness and consciousness in cognitive neuroscience were presented.

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