Abstract
Research on the scope and limits of non-conscious vision can advance our understanding of the functional and neural underpinnings of visual awareness. Here we investigated whether distributed local features can be bound, outside of awareness, into coherent patterns. We used continuous flash suppression (CFS) to create interocular suppression, and thus lack of awareness, for a moving dot stimulus that varied in terms of coherence with an overall pattern (radial flow). Our results demonstrate that for radial motion, coherence favors the detection of patterns of moving dots even under interocular suppression. Coherence caused dots to break through the masks more often: this indicates that the visual system was able to integrate low-level motion signals into a coherent pattern outside of visual awareness. In contrast, in an experiment using meaningful or scrambled biological motion we did not observe any increase in the sensitivity of detection for meaningful patterns. Overall, our results are in agreement with previous studies on face processing and with the hypothesis that certain features are spatiotemporally bound into coherent patterns even outside of attention or awareness.
Highlights
One of the most striking aspects of visual perception is visual awareness, the subjective experience that our brain creates from the information impinging on our retinas
Our main finding is that radial motion coherency facilitates detection of patterns of moving dots presented under interocular suppression
Our results suggest that the visual system is able to extract coherence out of radial non-conscious motion information
Summary
One of the most striking aspects of visual perception is visual awareness, the subjective experience that our brain creates from the information impinging on our retinas. An open question is to what extent the visual system can process and interpret information of nonconscious stimuli. The answer to the question of the limits of nonconscious processing of information is highly relevant for theories of visual awareness as it spotlights the distinction between conscious and non-conscious processing [4,5]. The role of awareness in the processing of sensory signals is debated. It remains controversial whether the various basic visual features processed in early vision, such as orientation, color and motion, can be bound into meaningful objects without awareness (for reviews see [6,7])
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