Lip Reading Without Awareness

摘要

Because speech perception is vitally important, the visual system may possess exceptional sensitivity to track speech-related signals conveyed by lip movements even when the observer is unaware of the speaking face. We tested this possibility using continuous flash suppression (CFS; e.g., Tsuchiya & Koch, 2005), in which a critical stimulus, a speaking face, was presented to one eye while a strong dynamic mask presented to the other eye rendered the speaking face invisible. We determined whether the visual system could still encode spatiotemporal patterns of lip movements when observers were aware of only the randomly flashing mask display.