HMN 2026: How People consciously recognize the meaning of words they can no longer see

When humans are awake, they are typically aware of specific sounds, movements, objects and other stimuli in their surroundings. Most of these are stimuli that they can see, hear or perceive with any of their other senses.

The processes through which information becomes part of people’s conscious experience have been widely studied in the past, but they have not yet been fully elucidated. Some psychology theories suggest that consciousness arises gradually, as the brain’s representations of information gathered through the senses become stronger. Other theories, on the other hand, suggest that sensory information is first processed by the brain and only enters consciousness when it is broadcast to brain networks supporting advanced mental processes.

Researchers at Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center—UMR 8002 CNRS/Université Paris-Cité and Royal Holloway-University of London recently tried to shed more light on this topic by investigating whether people can consciously access the meaning of visual stimuli when their sensory details are masked or unavailable. Their findings, published in Communications Psychology, suggest that the brain can consciously access the meaning of words even when the words are no longer visible.

When hidden words are recognized but not seen

The authors of the recent paper wanted to determine whether people can still be consciously aware of the meaning of stimuli when they cannot perceive them using their senses. To do this, they carried out two experiments in which participants were briefly presented with words on a screen, shortly followed by a stimulus that disrupted their visual processing and then by audio recordings of a voice uttering a word related or unrelated to the earlier word.

“What is the role of sensory processing in conscious perception?” wrote Daphne Rimsky Robert, Mattero Lisi and their colleagues in their paper. “Current theories of consciousness are divided on this question. Some propose that conscious perception arises during the buildup of sensory representations.

“Others argue for a secondary process that broadcasts these representations to higher-level areas. This second view makes a counterintuitive prediction: one could consciously perceive abstract representations untied to any low-level sensory feature. We tested this prediction by combining visual masking with retrospective cueing.”

Essentially, the participants were shown a word on a screen for a very short time, which was then replaced by a visual mask (i.e., strings of random characters) that disrupted their visual processing. Once the masked word disappeared, the participants heard a recording of a person speaking a word that was either related or unrelated to the masked word.

At the end of each experimental trial, the participants were asked whether they detected any written word and, if they did, what word that was. They were also asked if they could remember specific features of the word on the screen, such as its position on the screen or whether it was written in uppercase or lowercase letters.

“We found that when visually masked words were followed by a semantically related auditory word, participants were better at detecting this past word and reporting its identity, but were strikingly unable to report its visual features (letter casing or position on screen),” wrote the authors.

“This suggests that retro-cueing can help a semantic representation achieve awareness even after the associated sensory information has been masked. The mechanisms of conscious access might thus be largely independent of early sensory buildup.”

New insight into the intricacies of conscious experiences

The team’s findings suggest that people can sometimes pick up the meaning of stimuli that they saw only for a very short time, even if they cannot recall the stimuli’s visual characteristics. They thus appear to support earlier theories suggesting that consciousness depends on a later-stage broadcasting process, as opposed to the gradual creation of sensory representations in the brain.

In addition, the observations gathered by the researchers suggest that meaning-based (i.e., semantic) representations in the brain can be retained for longer than sensory representations, particularly if a stimulus is perceived very briefly. Other research groups could draw inspiration from this study and set out to explore the neural and cognitive underpinnings of conscious awareness using similar experimental approaches.

In the future, studies in this field could help paint a clearer picture of how sensory stimuli enter conscious awareness and how they are represented in the brain.

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