Bistable Perception Is Biased by Search Items but Not by Search Priming.

M A B Brinkhuis,Á Kristjánsson,J W Brascamp

doi:10.1177/2041669518812485

Abstract

During visual search, selecting a target facilitates search for similar targets in the future, known as search priming. During bistable perception, in turn, perceiving one interpretation facilitates perception of the same interpretation in the future, a form of sensory memory. Previously, we investigated the relation between these history effects by asking: can visual search influence perception of a subsequent ambiguous display and can perception of an ambiguous display influence subsequent visual search? We found no evidence for such influences, however. Here, we investigated one potential factor that might have prevented such influences from arising: lack of retinal overlap between the ambiguous stimulus and the search array items. In the present work, we therefore interleaved presentations of an ambiguous stimulus with search trials in which the target or distractor occupied the same retinal location as the ambiguous stimulus. Nevertheless, we again found no evidence for influences of visual search on bistable perception, thus demonstrating no close relation between search priming and sensory memory. We did, however, find that visual search items primed perception of a subsequent ambiguous stimulus at the same retinal location, regardless of whether they were a target or a distractor item: a form of perceptual priming. Interestingly, the strengths of search priming and this perceptual priming were correlated on a trial-to-trial basis, suggesting that a common underlying factor influences both.

Highlights

The human visual system represents the physical world to guide behavior in a useful way
In a subsequent study, Chopin and Mamassian (2011) found that the surface of an ambiguous stimulus was more often perceived in the front when this surface contained a search target. While their results did not show a relation between search and perceptual biases directly, they show a link between the processes that are involved in both search perception, and, importantly, that an attentional shift between stimulus features may affect both search and perceptual outcomes. Given this indirect evidence that search priming, by altering attention allocation, may influence bistable perception, we considered whether the lack of such an influence in our previous work was due to an incidental experiment design choice
While search priming effects spread across the visual field, the range at which bistable perception can be influenced by history effects has been found to be narrower (Chen & He, 2004; Knapen, Adams, & Graf, 2009)

Summary

Introduction

The human visual system represents the physical world to guide behavior in a useful way. This representation, can only be an approximation of the environment, due to physiological restrictions as well as inconclusive sensory information. The meaning of a visual scene becomes ambiguous in certain conditions. In such a situation, the visual system prefers one interpretation over the other (Pastukhov et al, 2013). This can manifest as bistable perception of ambiguous figures—meaning that an observer sees different interpretations of the same ambiguous stimulus in alternation. Many studies have shown that, when such stimuli are shown repeatedly, a type of sensory memory due to previous presentations biases perception at the start of a subsequent presentation (de Jong, Knapen, & van Ee, 2012; Leopold, Wilke, Maier, & Logothetis, 2002; Maier, Wilke, Logothetis, & Leopold, 2003; Pastukhov, 2016; Pastukhov & Braun, 2008; Pearson & Brascamp, 2008)

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