Abstract:Breaking Continuous Flash Suppression (bCFS) has been adopted as an appealing means to study human visual awareness, but the literature is beclouded by inconsistent and contradictory results. Although previous reviews have focused chiefly on design pitfalls and instances of false reasoning, we show in this study that the choice of analysis pathway can have severe effects on the statistical output when applied to bCFS data. Using a representative dataset designed to address a specific controversy in the realm o… Show more
“…This is vividly demonstrated by the feature-selective suppression in Experiment 5. This adds to related concerns with regards to interocular suppression (Kerr, Hesselmann, Räling, Wartenburger, & Sterzer, 2017;Moors, Boelens, van Overwalle, & Wagemans, 2016;Moors, Hesselmann, Wagemans, & van Ee, 2017;Stein et al, 2011).…”
We used a novel method to capture the spatial dominance pattern of competing motion fields at rivalry onset. When rivaling velocities were different, the participants reported center-surround segmentation: The slower stimuli often dominated in the center while faster motion persisted along the borders. The size of the central static/slow field scaled with the stimulus size. The central dominance was time-locked to the static stimulus onset but was disrupted if the dynamic stimulus was presented later. We then used the same stimuli as masks in an interocular suppression paradigm. The local suppression strengths were probed with targets at different eccentricities. Consistent with the centersurround segmentation, target speed and location interacted with mask velocities. Specifically, suppression power of the slower masks was nonhomogenous with eccentricity, providing a potential explanation for centersurround velocity-based segmentation. This interaction of speed, eccentricity, and timing has implications for motion processing and interocular suppression. The influence of different masks on which target features get suppressed predicts that some ''unconscious effects'' are not generalizable across masks and, thus, need to be replicated under various masking conditions.
“…This is vividly demonstrated by the feature-selective suppression in Experiment 5. This adds to related concerns with regards to interocular suppression (Kerr, Hesselmann, Räling, Wartenburger, & Sterzer, 2017;Moors, Boelens, van Overwalle, & Wagemans, 2016;Moors, Hesselmann, Wagemans, & van Ee, 2017;Stein et al, 2011).…”
We used a novel method to capture the spatial dominance pattern of competing motion fields at rivalry onset. When rivaling velocities were different, the participants reported center-surround segmentation: The slower stimuli often dominated in the center while faster motion persisted along the borders. The size of the central static/slow field scaled with the stimulus size. The central dominance was time-locked to the static stimulus onset but was disrupted if the dynamic stimulus was presented later. We then used the same stimuli as masks in an interocular suppression paradigm. The local suppression strengths were probed with targets at different eccentricities. Consistent with the centersurround segmentation, target speed and location interacted with mask velocities. Specifically, suppression power of the slower masks was nonhomogenous with eccentricity, providing a potential explanation for centersurround velocity-based segmentation. This interaction of speed, eccentricity, and timing has implications for motion processing and interocular suppression. The influence of different masks on which target features get suppressed predicts that some ''unconscious effects'' are not generalizable across masks and, thus, need to be replicated under various masking conditions.
“…5). To make sure the “no response” trials (constituting of 6.99% of the trials, SD = 5.42%) did not bias the distribution of reaction times (Kerr, Hesselmann, Räling, Wartenburger, & Sterzer, 2017), we conducted the same analysis on the data when excluding them, too, so that only trials on which subjects were correct in identifying the object location were included. The same pattern of results was found, though the suppression durations were obviously shorter (overall suppression: M = 5.26 s, SD = 1.97; photographs: M = 5.53 s, SD = 2.03; real objects: M = 5.00 s, SD = 1.96).Fig.…”
Continuous flash suppression (CFS) is a popular method for suppressing visual stimuli from awareness for relatively long periods. Thus far, this method has only been used for suppressing two-dimensional images presented on screen. We present a novel variant of CFS, termed “real-life” CFS, in which a portion of the actual immediate surroundings of an observer—including three-dimensional, real-life objects—can be rendered unconscious. Our method uses augmented reality goggles to present subjects with CFS masks to the dominant eye, leaving the nondominant eye exposed to the real world. In three experiments we demonstrated that real objects can indeed be suppressed from awareness for several seconds, on average, and that the suppression duration is comparable to that obtained using classic, on-screen CFS. As supplementary information, we further provide an example of experimental code that can be modified for future studies. This technique opens the way to new questions in the study of consciousness and its functions.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.3758/s13428-018-1162-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
“…The difference between the two conditions cannot be solely attributed to the low-level features of the SC words. We would rather interpret this difference as the form familiarity effect (lower level compared to emotional or semantic), suggesting that upright words are more expected than inverted words because the former are more frequently encountered in daily life (Kerr et al, 2017). This interpretation is confirmed by our findings in both CFS sessions in which upright words were detected faster than inverted words despite the null findings of emotional or semantic processing.…”
Previous studies have demonstrated the automatic vigilance effect for faces and pictures and have attributed it to the brain’s prioritized unconscious evaluation of early evolutionary stimuli that are critical to survival. Whether this effect exists for evolutionarily more recent stimuli, such as written words, has become the center of much debate. Apparently contradicting results have been reported in different languages, such as Hebrew, English, and Traditional Chinese (TC), with regard to the unconscious processing of emotional words in breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS). Our current study used two experiments (with two-character words or single-character words) to verify whether the emotional valence or the length of Simplified Chinese (SC) words would modulate conscious access in b-CFS. We failed to replicate the findings reported in Yang and Yeh (2011) using TC, but found that complex high-level emotional information could not be extracted from interocularly suppressed words regardless of their length. Our findings comply with the distinction between subliminal and preconscious states in Global Neuronal Workspace Theory and support the current notion that preconsciousness or partial awareness may be indispensable for high-level cognitive tasks such as reading comprehension.
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