Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Some patients with a lesion to the primary visual cortex (V1) show "blindsight": the remarkable ability to guess correctly about attributes of stimuli presented to the blind hemifield. Here, we show that blindsight can be induced in normal observers by using transcranial magnetic stimulation of the occipital cortex but exclusively for the affective content of unseen stimuli. Surprisingly, access to the affective content of stimuli disappears upon prolonged task training or when stimulus visibility increases, allegedly increasing the subjects' confidence in their overall performance. This finding suggests that availability of conscious information suppresses access to unconscious information, supporting the idea of consciousness as a repressant of unconscious tendencies.
Jolij et al. (Tue,) studied this question.