The Missing Memory Imprint

We provide evidence that the brain searches for salient stimuli below the level of conscious awareness. We show that, while targets are found very efficiently in Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), distractors do not leave a strong memory trace, especially if the memory probe is unexpected. This fits with traditional theories of late attentional selection, whereby “correct rejections” of non-targets are performed with very little processing cost. Our findings are also consistent with the tokenized percept theory of conscious perception, one element of which is that conscious awareness is required to provide sustained representations.