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Abstract
In the presence of a continually changing sensory environment, maintaining stable but flexible awareness is paramount, and requires continual organization of information. Determining which stimulus features belong together, and which are separate is therefore one of the primary tasks of the sensory systems. Unknown is whether there is a global or sensory-specific mechanism that regulates the final perceptual outcome of this streaming process. To test the extent of modality independence in perceptual control, an auditory streaming experiment, and a visual moving-plaid experiment were performed. Both were designed to evoke alternating perception of an integrated or segregated percept. In both experiments, transient auditory and visual distractor stimuli were presented in separate blocks, such that the distractors did not overlap in frequency or space with the streaming or plaid stimuli, respectively, thus preventing peripheral interference. When a distractor was presented in the opposite modality as the bistable stimulus (visual distractors during auditory streaming or auditory distractors during visual streaming), the probability of percept switching was not significantly different than when no distractor was presented. Conversely, significant differences in switch probability were observed following within-modality distractors, but only when the pre-distractor percept was segregated. Due to the modality-specificity of the distractor-induced resetting, the results suggest that conscious perception is at least partially controlled by modality-specific processing. The fact that the distractors did not have peripheral overlap with the bistable stimuli indicates that the perceptual reset is due to interference at a locus in which stimuli of different frequencies and spatial locations are integrated.
Highlights
Our sensory systems are continuously tasked with extracting the most relevant information from noisy environments
visual distractors were intermittently introduced to the stimuli
while the alternatemodality distractor had no impact on perception
Summary
Our sensory systems are continuously tasked with extracting the most relevant information from noisy environments. Established stimulus parameters that provoke equivalent integrated/segregated perceptions, though bistable, have a strong initial bias to be perceived as integrated before switching to segregated, and introduction of transient stimuli of the same sensory modality typically “reset” perception from segregated to integrated (Anstis and Saida, 1985; Rogers and Bregman, 1998; Cusack et al, 2004; Roberts et al, 2008) These dynamics suggest that the neural mechanism responsible for making perceptualdecisions has a default, or baseline percept, and prompts the question of whether the same switching mechanisms are responsible for spontaneous switches as stimulus driven switches, and whether this process operates as a modality-general network as predicted by Global Workspace Theory (Changeux and Dehaene, 2008; Dehaene and Changeux, 2011)
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