Scene incongruity and attention.

Does scene incongruity, (a mismatch between scene gist and a semantically incongruent object), capture attention and lead to conscious perception? We explored this question using 4 different procedures: Inattention (Experiment 1), Scene description (Experiment 2), Change detection (Experiment 3), and Iconic Memory (Experiment 4). We found no differences between scene incongruity and scene congruity in Experiments 1, 2, and 4, although in Experiment 3 change detection was faster for scenes containing an incongruent object. We offer an explanation for why the change detection results differ from the results of the other three experiments.

No iconic memory without attention.

The experiments reported extend the findings of our earlier paper, (Mack, Erol, & Clarke, 2015) and allow us to reject Bachmann and Aru's critique of our conclusion (2015) that IM requires attention. They suggested our manipulations, which diverted attention from a letter reporting task in a dual task procedure where the task-cue occurred after the array disappeared, might only have affected access to IM and not the "existence of the phenomenal experience". By further decreasing the probability of reporting letters to only 10% and adding a final trial in which the letter matrix was either completely absent or distorted, we found more than half our subjects were unaware of its absence, or distortion i.

Reply to Bachmann and Aru.

A reply to the Bachmann and Aru (2015) critique of our paper (Mack, Erol, & Clarke, 2015) in which we rebut their criticisms and argue once again that our results support our view that iconic memory requires attention.

Iconic memory is not a case of attention-free awareness.

Whether or not awareness entails attention is a much debated question. Since iconic memory has been generally assumed to be attention-free, it has been considered an important piece of evidence that it does not (Koch & Tsuchiya, 2007). Therefore the question of the role of attention in iconic memory matters.