Consciously detecting and recognizing a past visual word after its sensory trace is gone
Communications Psychology June 9, 2026 Daphne Rimsky Robert, Matteo Lisi, Kévin Nguy et al.
Conscious perception of a word's meaning can occur even when its visual features are inaccessible. In an experiment, participants viewed briefly flashed, visually masked words. When a semantically related spoken word followed, they could better detect and identify the previous word but could not report its letter casing or screen position. This suggests that a semantic representation can reach awareness via retro-cueing after sensory details are masked, supporting theories that conscious access relies on a secondary broadcasting process largely independent of early sensory buildup.