Seeing without knowing: task relevance dissociates between visual awareness and recognition

Abstract

We demonstrate that task relevance dissociates between visual awareness and knowledge activation to create a state of seeing without knowing-visual awareness of familiar stimuli without recognizing them. We rely on the fact that in order to experience a Kanizsa illusion, participants must be aware of its inducers. While people can indicate the orientation of the illusory rectangle with great ease (signifying that they have consciously experienced the illusion's inducers), almost 30% of them could not report the inducers' color. Thus, people can see, in the sense of phenomenally experiencing, but not know, in the sense of recognizing what the object is or activating appropriate knowledge about it. Experiment 2 tests whether relevance-based selection operates within objects and shows that, contrary to the pattern of results found with features of different objects in our previous studies and replicated in Experiment 1, selection does not occur when both relevant and irrelevant features belong to the same object. We discuss these findings in relation to the existing theories of consciousness and to attention and inattentional blindness, and the role of cognitive load, object-based attention, and the use of self-reports as measures of awareness.

Learning how to exploit sources of information

“…However, performance on this first-trial question was substantially better than it was in H. Chen and Wyble (2015a), a case in which the surprise trial occurred after a substantial number of trials. This difference presumably indicates that experience with the task enables participants to develop an entrenched task set that allows them to locate the target without processing its identity in a way that allows them to remember it (see also Eitam, Shoval, & Yeshurun, 2015).…”

Working memory representations persist in the face of unexpected task alterations

“…Furthermore, in the cognitive psychology literature, surprise test methodologies are an important tool for explicitly probing memory of stimuli that subjects did not expect to report. Inattentional blindness (Mack & Rock, 1998), change blindness (Simons & Levin, 1997), and attribute amnesia (Chen & Wyble, 2015a) have importantly shown the limitations of human visual processing by using surprise tests (e.g., Chen, Swan, & Wyble, 2016;Eitam, Shoval, & Yeshurun, 2015;Eitam, Yeshurun, Hassan, 2013;Shin & Ma, 2016;Swan, Collins, & Wyble, 2016). It is debated whether the inability to answer such surprise questions is due to a failure to encode the information (i.e., a failure of perception; Mack & Rock, 1998) or a loss of the contents of working memory (i.e., amnesia ;Jiang, Shupe, Swallow, & Tan, 2016;Wolfe, 1999).…”

From reaction (‘priming’) to motivated selection: changing conceptualizations of accessibility

“…Given that ROAR stipulates that the effect of relevance is on the activation of knowledge, we hypothesized that people were not 'phenomenally blind' to the irrelevant percept but rather, could not report what it was because, given that is was not relevant, it failed to activate the corresponding knowledge (i.e., become accessible). This prediction was confirmed in a study in which participants that were ostensibly 'blind' (in the sense of non-accessibility) to the inducers of a Kantiza illusion (see Figure 2) nonetheless displayed the illusion by "successfully" judging the orientation of the (relevant) illusory shape (Eitam et al, 2015). Importantly, this extension of ROAR supplies some grounding to claims that the phenomenal experience is in fact spared from relevance-based selection (cf.…”