Expectations accelerate entry of visual stimuli into awareness

Abstract

How do expectations influence transitions between unconscious and conscious perceptual processing? According to the influential predictive processing framework, perceptual content is determined by predictive models of the causes of sensory signals. On one interpretation, conscious contents arise when predictive models are verified by matching sensory input (minimizing prediction error). On another, conscious contents arise when surprising events falsify current perceptual predictions. Finally, the cognitive impenetrability account posits that conscious perception is not affected by such higher level factors. To discriminate these positions, we combined predictive cueing with continuous flash suppression (CFS) in which the relative contrast of a target image gradually increases over time. In four experiments we established that expected stimuli enter consciousness faster than neutral or unexpected stimuli. These effects are difficult to account for in terms of response priming, pre-existing stimulus associations, or the attentional mechanisms that cause asynchronous temporal order judgments (of simultaneously presented stimuli). Our results further suggest that top-down expectations play a larger role when bottom-up input is ambiguous, in line with predictive processing accounts of perception. Taken together, our findings support the hypothesis that conscious access depends on verification of perceptual predictions.

A global attentional scope setting prioritizes faces for conscious detection

“…These findings demonstrate that endogenous attentional scope settings can gate the processing of incoming visual input, fundamentally altering the contents of subjective conscious experience. Furthermore, these results are in line with previous research showing that contextual or endogenous factors can facilitate conscious detection of congruent stimuli (Alsius & Munhall, 2013;Gayet, Van der Stigchel, & Paffen, 2014a;Lupyan & Ward, 2013;Pinto et al, 2015;Salomon, Lim, Herbelin, Hesselmann, & Blanke, 2013;. For instance, when observers listened to a sentence, invisible faces with lip movements congruent with the sentence broke from CFS more quickly than faces with incongruent lip movements (Alsius & Munhall, 2013).…”

“…For instance, when observers listened to a recording of a sentence, invisible faces with lip movements congruent with the sentence broke from CFS more quickly than faces with incongruent lip movements (Alsius & Munhall, 2013). Furthermore, internally generated expectations have been shown to reduce suppression time for congruent visual images (Pinto, van Gaal, de Lange, Lamme, & Seth, 2015;. Specifically, word cues (e.g., ''face,'' ''house,'' or ''neutral'') presented prior to b-CFS reduced suppression time for congruent images, while also increasing suppression times for incongruent images (Pinto et al, 2015).…”

“…Furthermore, internally generated expectations have been shown to reduce suppression time for congruent visual images (Pinto, van Gaal, de Lange, Lamme, & Seth, 2015;. Specifically, word cues (e.g., ''face,'' ''house,'' or ''neutral'') presented prior to b-CFS reduced suppression time for congruent images, while also increasing suppression times for incongruent images (Pinto et al, 2015). This finding holds for both high-level categories (e.g., chairs, cats, guitars, people), as well as low-level visual information (e.g., Gabor orientation; .…”

A social Bayesian brain: How social knowledge can shape visual perception

“…Another binocular rivalry experiment that relied not on learned associations but on the strong intrinsic physiological goal of hunger (Radel & Clement-Guillotin, 2012) showed that hungry participants showed preferences in bistable perception towards items related to food than non-food. Finally, to test the effects of prior expectations on conscious access, Pinto and colleagues (Pinto, van Gaal, de Lange, Lamme, & Seth, 2015) employed a modified binocular rivalry task, a socalled 'breakthrough against continuous flash suppression' paradigm. In this paradigm, one eye views constantly changing Mondrian-style images (which initially dominate conscious perception), while the other eye views an image of an object.…”

Dynamic interactions between top-down expectations and conscious awareness

“…Support for this notion is provided by studies that have shown that valid predictions increase the speed of conscious access [22][23][24][25][26] into conscious awareness, thereby enabling the switch from a nonconscious to a conscious stimulus representation, instead of just facilitating its cognitive interpretation or its speed of appearance in time.…”