Semantic Preconscious Modes of Cognition: An Experimental Study Abstract Purnima Sethi, Student Member, SSI, and Ankita Mathur

The term cognition, i.e. to know, to conceptualize, or to recognize, generally refers to the processing of information by human mind, mental processes (thoughts), application of knowledge and changing of preferences. Cognitive processes are often classified as conscious and unconscious. Sigmund Freud popularized the idea of the unconscious, a sector of the mind that harbors thoughts and memories actively removed from conscious deliberation. The term preconscious is chosen in preference to others, such as unconscious, subconscious, subliminal, or implicit because it has the useful connotation of something that is on its way to being conscious, or which could become escalated to consciousness in the right circumstances. In this study, we have attempted to investigate these modes of cognitive processing through a psychophysical experimental approach. We conducted a survey on a set of 25 university students who were exposed to a visual cue containing a set of four numbers (Arabic digits) and depending on the task were asked to extract their average value or compare it against a reference value. The target stimuli were preceded by a hidden visual cue (presented much below the threshold of conscious perception) that could be valid or invalid and all the target stimuli were also presented very briefly to the subjects, for approximately about half a second. The intent was to investigate the possibility of ensemble coding for abstract yet highly familiar symbolic stimuli (Arabic numbers) and also to understand the relation between ensemble coding and conscious perception. We observed that the subjects could mostly extract correct mean values in this short exposure time with a few outliers both slightly above and below the mean value and that the subjects exhibited a bias towards overweighting the large targets. We also distinctly observed that the hidden cues remarkably influenced the subjects reaction to the main response. Thus, we infer from these results that approximate averaging might rely on intuitive parallel computations and that four simultaneous digits can be processed without conscious access at a semantic level. It is likely that approximate averaging essentially amounts to finding the typical value of a set, and could be accomplished by a parallel process where all magnitudes are simultaneously weighted and their votes used to converge to single attractor value. The results of these experiments extend previous findings on ensemble coding as they indicate that an ensemble code could be extracted from a set of abstract symbolic stimuli that are presented without the participants awareness. Thus awareness or consciousness might be an unnecessary condition for ensemble coding. The idea here is that consciousness is instantaneous but takes time to manifest through the brain pathways, thus the preconscious reactions are faster than conscious reactions.
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