scholarly journals Breaking continuous flash suppression: A measure of unconscious processing during interocular suppression?

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 315-315
Author(s):  
T. Stein ◽  
M. Hebart ◽  
P. Sterzer
Keyword(s):  
Interocular Suppression ◽  
Unconscious Processing ◽  
Continuous Flash Suppression

scholarly journals Color Can Shorten Breakthrough Times in Continuous Flash Suppression through Increased Salience and Task Relevance

Vision ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Christian Valuch
Keyword(s):  
Visual Search ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Interocular Suppression ◽  
Continuous Flash Suppression ◽  
Task Relevance ◽  
Mediated Effects ◽  
Dominant Eye ◽  
Human Participants ◽  
And Task

Color can enhance the perception of relevant stimuli by increasing their salience and guiding visual search towards stimuli that match a task-relevant color. Using Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS), the current study investigated whether color facilitates the discrimination of targets that are difficult to perceive due to interocular suppression. Gabor patterns of two or four cycles per degree (cpd) were shown as targets to the non-dominant eye of human participants. CFS masks were presented at a rate of 10 Hz to the dominant eye, and participants had the task to report the target’s orientation as soon as they could discriminate it. The 2-cpd targets were robustly suppressed and resulted in much longer response times compared to 4-cpd targets. Moreover, only for 2-cpd targets, two color-related effects were evident. First, in trials where targets and CFS masks had different colors, targets were reported faster than in trials where targets and CFS masks had the same color. Second, targets with a known color, either cyan or yellow, were reported earlier than targets whose color was randomly cyan or yellow. The results suggest that the targets’ entry to consciousness may have been speeded by color-mediated effects relating to increased (bottom-up) salience and (top-down) task relevance.

scholarly journals Dimensions of Perception: 3D Real-Life Objects Are More Readily Detected Than Their 2D Images

2021 ◽  
pp. 095679762110107
Author(s):  
Uri Korisky ◽  
Liad Mudrik
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
Augmented Reality ◽  
3D Printing ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Interocular Suppression ◽  
Continuous Flash Suppression ◽  
3D Objects ◽  
Real Objects ◽  
2D Images

Most of our interactions with our environment involve manipulating real 3D objects. Accordingly, 3D objects seem to enjoy preferential processing compared with 2D images, for example, in capturing attention or being better remembered. But are they also more readily perceived? Thus far, the possibility of preferred detection for real 3D objects could not be empirically tested because suppression from awareness has been applied only to on-screen stimuli. Here, using a variant of continuous flash suppression (CFS) with augmented-reality goggles (“real-life” CFS), we managed to suppress both real 3D objects and their 2D representations. In 20 healthy young adults, real objects broke suppression faster than their photographs. Using 3D printing, we also showed in 50 healthy young adults that this finding held only for meaningful objects, whereas no difference was found for meaningless, novel ones (a similar trend was observed in another experiment with 20 subjects, yet it did not reach significance). This suggests that the effect might be mediated by affordances facilitating detection of 3D objects under interocular suppression.

scholarly journals Causal events enter awareness faster than non-causal events

PeerJ ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. e2932 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pieter Moors ◽  
Johan Wagemans ◽  
Lee de-Wit
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Methods ◽  
Perceptual Processing ◽  
Interocular Suppression ◽  
Continuous Flash Suppression ◽  
Perception Of Causality ◽  
Suppression Technique ◽  
Visual Phenomena ◽  
Sensory Evidence ◽  
Low Levels ◽  
Visual Properties

Philosophers have long argued that causality cannot be directly observed but requires a conscious inference (Hume, 1967). Albert Michotte however developed numerous visual phenomena in which people seemed to perceive causality akin to primary visual properties like colour or motion (Michotte, 1946). Michotte claimed that the perception of causality did not require a conscious, deliberate inference but, working over 70 years ago, he did not have access to the experimental methods to test this claim. Here we employ Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS)—an interocular suppression technique to render stimuli invisible (Tsuchiya & Koch, 2005)—to test whether causal events enter awareness faster than non-causal events. We presented observers with ‘causal’ and ‘non-causal’ events, and found consistent evidence that participants become aware of causal events more rapidly than non-causal events. Our results suggest that, whilst causality must be inferred from sensory evidence, this inference might be computed at low levels of perceptual processing, and does not depend on a deliberative conscious evaluation of the stimulus. This work therefore supports Michotte’s contention that, like colour or motion, causality is an immediate property of our perception of the world.

scholarly journals Seeing What You Feel: Affect Drives Visual Perception of Structurally Neutral Faces

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika H. Siegel ◽  
Jolie B. Wormwood ◽  
Karen S. Quigley ◽  
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Keyword(s):  
Visual Perception ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
External World ◽  
The Body ◽  
Conscious Awareness ◽  
Interocular Suppression ◽  
Continuous Flash Suppression ◽  
Suppression Technique ◽  
Positive Stimuli ◽  
The Brain

Affective realism, the phenomenon whereby affect is integrated into an individual’s experience of the world, is a normal consequence of how the brain processes sensory information from the external world in the context of sensations from the body. In the present investigation, we provided compelling empirical evidence that affective realism involves changes in visual perception (i.e., affect changes how participants see neutral stimuli). In two studies, we used an interocular suppression technique, continuous flash suppression, to present affective images outside of participants’ conscious awareness. We demonstrated that seen neutral faces are perceived as more smiling when paired with unseen affectively positive stimuli. Study 2 also demonstrated that seen neutral faces are perceived as more scowling when paired with unseen affectively negative stimuli. These findings have implications for real-world situations and challenge beliefs that affect is a distinct psychological phenomenon that can be separated from cognition and perception.

Unconscious semantic priming from pictures under backward masking and continuous flash suppression

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timo Stein ◽  
Vanessa Utz ◽  
Filip Van Opstal
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Priming ◽  
Statistical Power ◽  
Priming Effect ◽  
Semantic Processing ◽  
Conscious Awareness ◽  
Backward Masking ◽  
Unconscious Processing ◽  
Continuous Flash Suppression ◽  
Sufficient Statistical Power ◽  
Target Words

It is debated which perceptual functions can take place unconsciously and which depend on conscious awareness. Here, we tested whether the meaning of invisible pictures can be processed unconsciously, and whether this would depend on the psychophysical technique used to render these images invisible. We measured whether pictures of animals or objects presented under backward masking or continuous flash suppression could prime the subsequent categorization of target words into animal or non-animal. The backward masking experiment failed to replicate the priming effect reported in two previous studies, despite sufficient statistical power. Similarly, the continuous flash suppression experiment provided no evidence for a priming effect. Thus, our experiments failed to demonstrate unconscious semantic processing of pictures. These results support the emerging view that unconscious processing is rather limited in scope.

scholarly journals Faces under continuous flash suppression capture attention faster than objects, but without a face evoked steady-state visual potential: Is curvilinearity responsible for the behavioral effect?

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew D. Engell ◽  
Henry Quillian
Keyword(s):  
Steady State ◽  
Face Perception ◽  
Behavioral Effect ◽  
Category Membership ◽  
List Type ◽  
Breakthrough Time ◽  
Interocular Suppression ◽  
Continuous Flash Suppression ◽  
Fearful Faces ◽  
Efficient Detection

AbstractFace perception is a vital part of human social interactions. The social value of faces makes their efficient detection evolutionarily advantageous. It has been suggested that this might occur nonconsciously, but experimental results are equivocal thus far. Here, we probe nonconscious face perception using a novel combination of binocular rivalry with continuous flash suppression, and steady-state visually evoked potentials. In the first two experiments, participants viewed either non-face objects, neutral faces (Study 1), or fearful faces (Study 2). Consistent with the hypothesis that faces are processed nonconsciously, we found that faces broke through suppression faster than objects. We did not, however, observe a concomitant face-selective SSVEP. Study 3 was run to reconcile this paradox. We hypothesized that the faster breakthrough time was due to a mid-level visual feature, curvilinearity, rather than high-level category membership, which would explain the behavioral difference without neural evidence of face-selective processing. We tested this hypothesis by presenting participants with four different groups of stimuli outside of conscious awareness: rectilinear objects (e.g., chessboard), curvilinear objects (e.g., dartboard), faces, and objects that were not dominantly curvilinear or rectilinear. We found that faces and curvilinear objects broke through suppression faster than objects and rectilinear objects. Moreover, there was no difference between faces and curvilinear objects. These results support our hypothesis that the observed behavioral advantage for faces is due to their curvilinearity, rather than category membership.HighlightsFaces presented outside of awareness do not evoke a steady-state visually evoked potential.This is true for both neutral and fearful faces.However, faces do breakthrough interocular suppression faster than objects.Curvilinear objects breakthrough interocular suppression faster than rectilinear objects.The breakthrough time advantage for faces over objects is due to their curvilinearity.

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