Graded Visual Consciousness During the Attentional Blink

Abstract

One of the ongoing debates about visual consciousness is whether it can be considered as an all-or-none or a graded phenomenon. This may depend on the experimental paradigm and the task used to investigate this question. The present event-related potential study (N = 32) focuses on the attentional blink paradigm for which so far only little and mixed evidence is available. Detection of T2 face targets during the attentional blink was assessed via an objective accuracy measure (reporting the faces’ gender), subjective visibility on a perceptual awareness scale (PAS) as well as event-related potentials time-locked to T2 onset (components P1, N1, N2, and P3). The behavioral results indicate a graded rather than an all-or-none pattern of visual awareness. Corresponding graded differences in the N1, N2, and P3 components were observed for the comparison of visibility levels. These findings suggest that conscious perception during the attentional blink can occur in a graded fashion.

Distrust before first sight? Examining knowledge- and appearance-based effects of trustworthiness on the visual consciousness of faces

“…Furthermore, no clear all-or-none pattern was found for influences of affective knowledge on visual consciousness, but rather a modulation of the strength or quality of the resulting percept-which raises the question whether the differences occurred at the time of attentional selection for visual consciousness, or at a later point in time. Although the result is in line with accounts that assume graded consciousness in the attentional blink (e.g., Fazekas & Overgaard, 2018; also see Eiserbeck et al, 2021), more direct evidence on the time course of the processing of affective knowledge in regard to the access to conscious perception is needed.…”

“…Since neural activity precedes the behavioral outcomes, we deemed it more plausible to predict detection by neural activity (mean ROI amplitude) rather than predicting neural activity by detection.4 For completeness, we would like to note that N2 activity based on the same data was investigated in the context of a different research topic and with different model specifications in another manuscript(Eiserbeck et al, 2021), where we examined N2 activity for each level of visibility (not seen / slight impression / strong impression / seen completely) and observed graded amplitude differences between successive levels.…”