[1]
Giulio Tononi (2004; Tononi & Koch 2008) argues that not only integration but also differentiation/segregation (e.g., distinguishing a particular state from all possible other states) is characteristic of conscious states. However, even when both conditions are met, say integration through convergence is observed in FFA and differentiated from other states, e.g., there is no activation in PPA, an area selective to processing places, and thus there is no guarantee that this would constitute a conscious state. In fact, experimental evidence suggests that such feature-selective processing can indeed proceed unconsciously, for example in the case of face processing under conditions of masking (de Gardelle et al. 2011), continuous flash suppression (Almeida et al. 2013), and in blindsight patients (Del Zotto et al. 2013).
[2]
We are usually conscious of objects, and become so by virtue of their being differentiated from the background, but also because their internal features are linked or bound in some way. Objects and their internal features do not need to be static entities but can have temporal dynamics, i.e., they develop or change in time. In this case, they become events (and thus event-objects of the conscious mind).
[3]
But they are by no means limited to ambiguous stimuli (Fischer & Whitney 2014; Treisman 1984).
[4]
Similarly, higher areas have larger receptive fields than lower areas, allowing integration over larger regions of space, and are often more broadly tuned (i.e., allow for more variability in the stimulus, e.g., different views of the same object). This resonates well with psychophysical evidence that hysteresis is spatially less specific and more broadly tuned than adaptation (Gepshtein & Kubovy 2005; Knapen et al. 2009).