Typical visual-field locations facilitate access to awareness for everyday objects

Abstract

In real-world vision, humans are constantly confronted with complex environments that contain a multitude of objects. These environments are spatially structured, so that objects have different likelihoods of appearing in specific parts of the visual space. Our massive experience with such positional regularities prompts the hypothesis that the processing of individual objects varies in efficiency across the visual field: when objects are encountered in their typical locations (e.g., we are used to seeing lamps in the upper visual field and carpets in the lower visual field), they should be more efficiently perceived than when they are encountered in atypical locations (e.g., a lamp in the lower visual field and a carpet in the upper visual field). Here, we provide evidence for this hypothesis by showing that typical positioning facilitates an object’s access to awareness. In two continuous flash suppression experiments, objects more efficiently overcame inter-ocular suppression when they were presented in visual-field locations that matched their typical locations in the environment, as compared to non-typical locations. This finding suggests that through extensive experience the visual system has adapted to the statistics of the environment. This adaptation may be particularly useful for rapid object individuation in natural scenes.