Repression of Unconscious Information by Conscious Processing: Evidence from Affective Blindsight Induced by Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

Some patients with a lesion to the primary visual cortex (V1) show "blindsight": the remarkable ability to guess correctly about attributes of stimuli presented to the blind hemifield. Here, we show that blindsight can be induced in normal observers by using transcranial magnetic stimulati...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 2005-07, Vol.102 (30), p.10747-10751
Main Authors: Jolij, Jacob, Victor A. F. Lamme, Posner, Michael I.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Biological Sciences
Blindness
Consciousness
Consciousness - physiology
Discrimination, Psychological - physiology
Emoticons
Emotional expression
Emotional suppression
Experimentation
Eyes & eyesight
Female
Happiness
Humans
Information
Magnetism
Male
Neurology
Perceptual localization
Photic Stimulation
Repression
Repression, Psychology
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
Unconscious mind
Unconscious, Psychology
Visual cortex
Visual Cortex - physiology
Visual Perception - physiology
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Summary:Some patients with a lesion to the primary visual cortex (V1) show "blindsight": the remarkable ability to guess correctly about attributes of stimuli presented to the blind hemifield. Here, we show that blindsight can be induced in normal observers by using transcranial magnetic stimulation of the occipital cortex but exclusively for the affective content of unseen stimuli. Surprisingly, access to the affective content of stimuli disappears upon prolonged task training or when stimulus visibility increases, allegedly increasing the subjects' confidence in their overall performance. This finding suggests that availability of conscious information suppresses access to unconscious information, supporting the idea of consciousness as a repressant of unconscious tendencies.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.0500834102