Fearful expressions gain preferential access to awareness during continuous flash suppression.

Yang, Eunjin; Zald, David H.; Blake, Randolph

doi:10.1037/1528-3542.7.4.882

Cited by 342 publications

(477 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…After all, in other circumstances suppression durations of a visual stimulus are impacted by the properties of that stimulus, including its physical characteristics (9), its configural properties (30,66), its affective connotation (67,68), its lexical familiarity (32), and its social connotation (69). However, in all these instances the features defining the suppressed stimulus are plausibly being registered and remain available for analysis (70), albeit with reduced fidelity or signal strength (34).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Melodic sound enhances visual awareness of congruent musical notes, but only if you can read music

Lee

Blake

Kim

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Predictive influences of auditory information on resolution of visual competition were investigated using music, whose visual symbolic notation is familiar only to those with musical training. Results from two experiments using different experimental paradigms revealed that melodic congruence between what is seen and what is heard impacts perceptual dynamics during binocular rivalry. This bisensory interaction was observed only when the musical score was perceptually dominant, not when it was suppressed from awareness, and it was observed only in people who could read music. Results from two ancillary experiments showed that this effect of congruence cannot be explained by differential patterns of eye movements or by differential response sluggishness associated with congruent score/melody combinations. Taken together, these results demonstrate robust audiovisual interaction based on high-level, symbolic representations and its predictive influence on perceptual dynamics during binocular rivalry.music | binocular rivalry | multisensory interaction | visual awareness | audio-visual congruence V ision can be confusing, particularly when the retinal images inaugurating vision are ambiguous or underspecified with respect to their origins (1, 2). In some situations, confusion can be resolved by reliance on contextual information (3), prior experience (4), expectations (5), and/or implicit knowledge about structural regularities in our visual environment (6). In other situations, however, confusion resists resolution, in which case one can directly experience the dynamical nature of competition as conflicting perceptual interpretations vie for dominance (7). Among the visual phenomena exhibiting this behavior, none is more compelling than binocular rivalry (8).When the two eyes view dissimilar monocular stimuli, stable binocular single vision gives way to interocular competition, characterized by unpredictable fluctuations in visual awareness of the rival stimuli (9, 10). Rivalry offers a way to study the inferential nature of perception when the brain is confronted with conflicting sensory evidence (11,12). Within this context, recent studies imply that rivalry dynamics are governed by influences related to the likelihood of competing perceptual interpretations, such as motor actions (13), affective connotation (14-16), familiarity (17), and concomitant sensory input from other modalities (18-20). Here we examined the limits of susceptibility of rivalry to predictive influences by asking whether binocular rivalry dynamics depend on multisensory congruence between abstract representations familiar to individuals with expertise in that domain of abstraction. The domain we selected was music, for three reasons: (i) musical notation is symbolic; (ii) only people versed in music can decipher that notation; and (iii) melodic structure can be experienced via sight or sound. ResultsExperiment 1: Extended Tracking of Binocular Rivalry. Experiment 1 was implemented as a conventional binocular rivalry task in which participants...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Melodic sound enhances visual awareness of congruent musical notes, but only if you can read music

Lee

Blake

Kim

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…Numerous studies have shown that object information is processed without awareness during interocular suppression (Jiang et al, 2007;Yang et al, 2007;Zhou et al, 2010;Mudrik et al, 2011;Stein et al, 2011aStein et al, ,b, 2012Stewart et al, 2012). For instance, upright faces (Jiang et al, 2007;Zhou et al, 2010;Stein et al, 2011aStein et al, , 2012, faces with direct gaze (Stein et al, 2011b;Yokoyama et al, 2013), or fearful faces (Yang et al, 2007;Stein et al, 2014) break suppression faster than inverted faces, faces with averted gaze, or neutral faces, respectively. In addition, incongruent scenes (e.g., soccer players dribbling a watermelon instead of a soccer ball) are detected faster than congruent scenes (Mudrik et al, 2011).…”

Section: Location Uncertainty Can Facilitate Unconscious Processing Imentioning

confidence: 99%

Less Is More: Semantic Information Survives Interocular Suppression When Attention Is Diverted

Eo¹,

Cha²,

Chong

et al. 2016

J. Neurosci.

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The extent of unconscious semantic processing has been debated. It is well established that semantic information is registered in the absence of awareness induced by inattention. However, it has been debated whether semantic information of invisible stimuli is processed during interocular suppression, a procedure that renders one eye's view invisible by presenting a dissimilar stimulus to the other eye. Inspired by recent evidence demonstrating that reduced attention attenuates interocular suppression, we tested a counterintuitive hypothesis that attention withdrawn from the suppressed target location facilitates semantic processing in the absence of awareness induced by interocular suppression. We obtained an electrophysiological marker of semantic processing (N400 component) while human participants' spatial attention was being manipulated with a cueing paradigm during interocular suppression. We found that N400 modulation was absent when participants' attention was directed to the target location, but present when diverted elsewhere. In addition, the correlation analysis across participants indicated that the N400 amplitude was reduced with more attention being directed to the target location. Together, these results indicate that inattention attenuates interocular suppression and thereby makes semantic processing available unconsciously, reconciling conflicting evidence in the literature. We discuss a tight link among interocular suppression, attention, and conscious awareness.

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“…Natural images are reported to be dominant over unnatural images in binocular rivalry [84], as are images of emotional over (more) neutral faces or scenes [85][86][87] and upright faces over inverted ones [88]. The personal preferences or mental condition of the observer [89 -91], as well as their cultural background or religion can also influence particular forms of rivalry [92].…”

Section: Context Of Internal Statementioning

confidence: 99%

United we sense, divided we fail: context-driven perception of ambiguous visual stimuli

Klink

Wezel

2012

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Ambiguous visual stimuli provide the brain with sensory information that contains conflicting evidence for multiple mutually exclusive interpretations. Two distinct aspects of the phenomenological experience associated with viewing ambiguous visual stimuli are the apparent stability of perception whenever one perceptual interpretation is dominant, and the instability of perception that causes perceptual dominance to alternate between perceptual interpretations upon extended viewing. This review summarizes several ways in which contextual information can help the brain resolve visual ambiguities and construct temporarily stable perceptual experiences. Temporal context through prior stimulation or internal brain states brought about by feedback from higher cortical processing levels may alter the response characteristics of specific neurons involved in rivalry resolution. Furthermore, spatial or crossmodal context may strengthen the neuronal representation of one of the possible perceptual interpretations and consequently bias the rivalry process towards it. We suggest that contextual influences on perceptual choices with ambiguous visual stimuli can be highly informative about the neuronal mechanisms of context-driven inference in the general processes of perceptual decision-making.

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Fearful expressions gain preferential access to awareness during continuous flash suppression.

Cited by 342 publications

References 32 publications

Melodic sound enhances visual awareness of congruent musical notes, but only if you can read music

Melodic sound enhances visual awareness of congruent musical notes, but only if you can read music

Less Is More: Semantic Information Survives Interocular Suppression When Attention Is Diverted

United we sense, divided we fail: context-driven perception of ambiguous visual stimuli

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