Temporal integration by multi-level regularities fosters the emergence of dynamic conscious experience

The relationship between integration and awareness is central to contemporary theories and research on consciousness. Here, we investigated whether and how information integration over time, by incorporating the underlying regularities, contributes to our awareness of the dynamic world. Using binocular rivalry, we demonstrated that structured visual streams, constituted by shape, motion, or idiom sequences containing perceptual- or semantic-level regularities, predominated over their nonstructured but otherwise matched counterparts in the competition for visual awareness. Despite the apparent resemblance, a substantial dissociation of the observed rivalry advantages emerged between perceptual- and semantic-level regularities. These effects stem from nonconscious and conscious temporal integration processes, respectively, with the former but not the latter being vulnerable to perturbations in the spatiotemporal integration window. These findings corroborate the essential role of structure-guided information integration in visual awareness and highlight a multi-level mechanism where temporal integration by perceptually and semantically defined regularities fosters the emergence of continuous conscious experience. How information integration contributes to the generation of consciousness in a dynamic environment remains unclear. In binocular rivalry, structured visual streams with perceptual- and semantic-level regularities dominate visual awareness over their non-structured counterparts. Such advantages stem from non-conscious and conscious temporal integration, respectively, and exhibit different tolerance to spatiotemporal perturbations within the integration window, revealing a multi-level mechanism whereby structure-guided temporal integration fosters the emergence of continuous conscious experience. # image