Previous studies have shown that contents held in working memory can guide visual selection, even when the contents are irrelevant to a subsequent visual search task. Search efficiency is enhanced when the stimulus matches the search target, and is decreased when the stimulus matches a distractor. So far there have not been any explorations into whether the working memory can influence unconscious visual processing, whilst also testing the mechanisms for working memory on unconscious visual processing. Here we probe this issue by combining the delayed matchto-sample task with the continuous flash suppression paradigm to test how working memory can modulate unconscious visual processing. Three studies were conducted to address these questions: In study 1, we found that suppressed faces matched the WM contents in emotional valence broke from suppression more quickly than the unmatched ones especially for the fearful faces. In the neuroimaging task, we found that suppressed fearful faces matched the WM contents in emotional valence could evoke a stronger connectivity between the amygdala and the face-related areas such as rFFA and the STG, moreover, the results showed that other functional connectivities between the frontal-parietal areas and the rFFA were also sensitive to the match in emotion valence among fearful faces. Our findings shed light on how the top-down influences from frontal-parietal areas and the projections from amygdala to visual areas interacted to contribute to consciousness. In study 2, we aimed to test whether unconscious emotional processing can be affected by the stimuli held in WM from another modality. Our results suggested that the WM emotional sounds could boost the unconscious fearful face processing via the match in emotional valence. Additionally, the suppressed neutral face could emerge from suppression more quickly when a fearful sound was asked to be retained or attened, which indicated the emotional information could exert an influence on the late stage of visual processing. In study 3, we tested how the object sounds kept in working memory could modulate unconscious object processing, and found that the suppression times could be faster based on a semantic congruency. In total, our studies have suggested that working memory as a flexible information selecting mechanism can act on the visual areas to enhance the possibility of the unperceived information to get access into awareness via a top-down modulation.
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