2026-10-14T21:48:54Z https://www.scidb.cn/oai

10.57760/sciencedb.30041 2026-06-01T16:17:24Z

2026-06-01 Unconscious Prioritization for Reward Objects doi:10.57760/sciencedb.30041 en A central question in psychology and neuroscience concerns the boundaries of human consciousness. Whether reward could prioritize the conscious access to a stimulus remains debated. This study addressed this issue using reward objects with inherent reward attributes as stimuli. Employing the breaking continuous flash suppression paradigm, Experiment 1 showed that high-reward object got a privilege in breaking into awareness compared to low-reward object. Experiment 2 ruled out the possibility that the observed effect was attributable to post-conscious processing. Experiment 3 employed accuracy-based measures confirmed the robustness of the effect. Experiment 4 demonstrated that the breakthrough difference between high- and low-reward objects could not be attributed to low-level factors. Experiments 5-8 further elucidated the potential mechanism underlying the unconscious reward advantage by dissociating rewarding properties from monetary value. Specifically, Experiments 5 and 6 showed that high-value non-reward object did not exhibit unconscious processing advantage, whereas Experiments 7 and 8 demonstrated that low-value reward object broke through suppression more rapidly than high-value non-reward object. These findings suggest that reward properties, rather than monetary value per se, constitute the critical determinant of this effect. Together, these results refine our understanding of the consciousness boundaries and highlight incentive salience as a key mechanism through which reward modulates unconscious visual processing. reward; unconscious processing; continuous flash suppression; incentive salience; consciousness; visual perception Fangxing Song Guang Feng Xingwang Zhang Jun Gao Weiwei Hou Nan Li EMBARGO https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ dataset Science Data Bank