The role of elaboration in the persistence of awareness for degraded objects

When a fragmented line-drawing of an object moves relative to a background of randomly oriented lines, the previously hidden object can be segregated from the background and consequently enters awareness. In this shape-from-motion paradigm, the percept of the object briefly persists after the motion stops, demonstrating the maintenance of a bound percept in awareness. This study investigated how the manipulation of object features that are crucial to recognition influences both the binding process and the maintenance of objects in awareness. Overall, we found that objects that took longer to recognize (i.e., objects missing their vertices) were nonetheless maintained in awareness for longer. We argue that this effect is mediated by additional elaborative processing that is required to bind these less recognizable forms, which generates stronger and more robust representations. These representations are then more easily maintained in awareness, suggesting an important role of elaborative mechanisms for conscious representations.