What can we experience and report on a rapidly presented image? Intersubjective measures of specificity of freely reported contents of consciousness

Abstract

Background: A majority of previous studies appear to support a view that human observers can only perceive coarse information from a natural scene image when it is presented rapidly (<100ms, masked). In these studies, participants were often forced to choose an answer from options that experimenters preselected. These options can underestimate what participants experience and can report on it. The current study aims to introduce a novel methodology to investigate how detailed information participants can report after briefly seeing a natural scene image. Methods: We used a novel free-report paradigm to examine what people can freely report following a rapidly presented natural scene image (67/133/267ms, masked). N = 670 online participants typed up to five words to report what they saw in the image together with confidence of the respective responses. We developed a novel index, Intersubjective Agreement (IA). IA quantifies how specifically the response words were used to describe the target image, with a high value meaning the word is not often reported for other images. Importantly, IA eliminates the need for experimenters to preselect response options. Results: The words with high IA values are often something detailed (e.g., a small object) in a particular image. With IA, unlike commonly believed, we demonstrated that participants reported highly specific and detailed aspects of the briefly (even at 67ms, masked) shown image. Further, IA is positively correlated with confidence, indicating metacognitive conscious access to the reported aspects of the image. Conclusion: These new findings challenge the dominant view that the content of rapid scene experience is limited to global and coarse gist. Our novel paradigm opens a door to investigate various contents of consciousness with a free-report paradigm.

How much can we differentiate at a brief glance: revealing the truer limit in conscious contents through the massive report paradigm (MRP)

“…This was despite the fact that we ran the experiment online, where one might expect the performance may not be as good as for in-laboratory participants. Along with previous psychophysics studies [ 35 , 39 – 41 ], we found that was not the case. We first considered the possibility that Experiment 1 participants showed worse performance because of memory decay (20 probes in Experiment 1 versus 6 probes in Experiment 2, after each image) or fatigue (2 h in Experiment 1 versus 30 min in Experiment 2).…”

“…For efficient data collection (and in part due to COVID restriction in face-to-face experiments), we performed Experiment 2 online. In our experience, online experiments work better by shortening the task, unlike two one-hour sessions as in Experiment 1 [ 35 ]. Given this, we proposed Experiment 2 to collect the data from 240 participants (i.e.…”

An adjunction hypothesis between qualia and reports

“…As another possible empirical experiment, we can propose "reconstruction" experiments using natural images 11 . For example, an array of natural images can be briefly presented to participants asking them what they saw in the image (Chuyin et al, 2022;Qianchen et al, 2022). In other words, this task is considered as a functor Report with conscious experiences as objects in Q and reports as objects in B.…”

“…In other words, this task is considered as a functor Report with conscious experiences as objects in Q and reports as objects in B. Participants can freely report what they saw by typing words (Chuyin et al, 2022). Or they can express whether they saw a patch of an image in the target image or not (Qianchen et al, 2022).…”

Minimal exposures reveal visual processing priorities

“…This requirement cannot be characterised in terms of stimulus energy, because the system may be differentially sensitive to attributes that are distinguished by stimulus configuration rather than physical amplitude (3)(4)(5). Observers are able to extract large amounts of information from brief displays, and certain types of information are perceived more readily than others (4)(5)(6)(7)(8), suggesting that visual pathways are calibratedperhaps by the top-down influence of pre-existing internal models (9) -to prioritise certain stimulus properties for processing. The more attuned the system is to a visual feature, the less exposure to this feature should be required to process it.…”