【英文摘要】Consciousness has become a challenging question in lifesciences.The viewpoint that consciousness is the processingof information at various levels of awareness is being widelyaccepted. It is inevitable to deal with unconscious orautomatic processing for explicating consciousness. The mainconcern is how consciousness is converted into unconsciousness,how unconsciousness is done into consciousness, and thepotential brain mechanisms of the conversion, includinginvolvements of anatomical and functional structure, synapticconnections in the neural networks and so on. The study ofunconsciousness is of great benefit to untie the mystery ofconsciousness that has been coming into focus by contemporaryneuroscience.Recent progress of the study on the mechanismsof unconscious processing was reviewed from the points ofcognitive neuroscience at different levels: the cognitiveprofile of unconsciousness, the correlation betweenunconsciousness and brain structures, and the interplay ofsynaptic connections. Contemporary research in cognitivepsychology revealed that unconscious processing could evenreach semantic level,including unconscious processing of image,character and figure.In addition,unconscious processing wasdifferent from conscious processing in nature and wasdistributed widely across the processing system of the brain,rather than localized in any particular unit. Recently,cognitive neuroscience has got lots of findings on perceptualunconscious processing with functional magnetic resonanceimaging ( fMRI) , positron emission tomography ( PET),electroencephalogram (EEG) etc.Various regions of the brainwere involved in perceptual unconscious processing. Both thehigher- and lower-order cortical areas had computational powerto make inferences about specific features of complex objects.The mechanism of synchronous neural activation of cortex waslikely to bind together various features that belonged toeach object and separate them from features of other objects.Evidence from neural networks and synapse also indicatedthat synchronous neural activation of the cortex was animportant mechanism of information processing. Finally, somepotential perspectives of how to study unconsciousness andconsciousness in cognitive neuroscience were presented.
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