Perceptually unidentifiable stimuli influence cortical processing and behavioral performance

Our daily behavior is dynamically influenced by conscious and unconscious processes. Although the neural bases of conscious experience have been extensively investigated over the past several decades, how unconscious information impacts neural circuitry and behavior remains unknown. Here, we recorded populations of neurons in macaque primary visual cortex (V1) to find that perceptually unidentifiable stimuli repeatedly presented in the absence of awareness are encoded by neural populations in a way that facilitates their future processing in the context of a behavioral task. Such exposure increases stimulus sensitivity and information encoded in cell populations, even though animals are unaware of stimulus identity. This phenomenon is consistent with a Hebbian mechanism underlying an increase in functional connectivity specifically for the neurons activated by subthreshold stimuli. This form of unsupervised adaptation may constitute a vestigial pre-attention system using the mere frequency of stimulus occurrence to change stimulus representations even when sensory inputs are perceptually invisible.