Subconscious processing reveals dissociable contextual modulations of visual size perception

Abstract

Visual size perception is highly context-dependent. In a series of experiments reported here, we demonstrated that the contextual modulation of visual size processing could occur independent of conscious awareness. Specifically, the Ebbinghaus illusion, which is mediated by lateral connections within the early visual processing stream, persisted even when the surrounding inducers were rendered invisible. Moreover, when the central target was initially interocularly suppressed, the identical target emerged from suppression faster when surrounded by small relative to large inducers, with the suppression time difference well predicted by the strength of the illusion. By contrast, there were no such subconscious contextual modulation effects associated with the Ponzo illusion, which largely relies on feedback projections to the early visual cortices. These results indicate that contextual information can modulate visual size perception without conscious awareness, and the dissociated modulation effects further suggest that subconscious contextual modulation takes place in the early visual processing stream and is largely independent of high-level feedback influences.