Abstract
Continuous flash suppression (CFS) is a popular method for suppressing visual stimuli from awareness for relatively long periods. Thus far, this method has only been used for suppressing two-dimensional images presented on screen. We present a novel variant of CFS, termed “real-life” CFS, in which a portion of the actual immediate surroundings of an observer—including three-dimensional, real-life objects—can be rendered unconscious. Our method uses augmented reality goggles to present subjects with CFS masks to the dominant eye, leaving the nondominant eye exposed to the real world. In three experiments we demonstrated that real objects can indeed be suppressed from awareness for several seconds, on average, and that the suppression duration is comparable to that obtained using classic, on-screen CFS. As supplementary information, we further provide an example of experimental code that can be modified for future studies. This technique opens the way to new questions in the study of consciousness and its functions.
Highlights
Continuous flash suppression (CFS) is a popular method for suppressing visual stimuli from awareness for relatively long periods
The sample size was determined on the basis of the effect we found in Experiment 2, using the G*Power package (Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, & Buchner, 2007) with α = .05 (20 subjects translated to over 99% power)
Confirmatory analysis on the subjects’ performance at determining on which side the stimulus appeared showed that performance was at chance for photographs, as reflected by accuracy (M = 0.50, SD = 0.07; t(19) = 0.18, p = 0.86, Cohen’s d = 0.04 BF10 = 0.24; BF10 is the Bayes factor quantifying the evidence for the research hypothesis relative to the null hypothesis, as opposed to BF01, which denotes the evidence for the null hypothesis relative to the research hypothesis; see Fig. 4, right)
Summary
Continuous flash suppression (CFS) is a popular method for suppressing visual stimuli from awareness for relatively long periods. Notwithstanding these controversies, the methodology itself has proved to be highly fruitful in consciousness studies and has opened the gate to new lines of research and new types of questions that have necessitated longer-duration stimuli (e.g., studying temporal intergration (Faivre & Koch, 2014) or causality (Moors, Wagemans, & de-Wit, 2017b)). Note that by using the term Breal-life^, we are not implying that the method allows one to suppress the entire environment; as we explain below, currently it is limited to suppressing a portion of the visual field This portion should suffice for experiments in which the subject can interact with the suppressed stimuli, which are reallife objects. We describe the details of this method and present two experiments in which it was used, as well as an additional experiment conducted using traditional CFS, in order to compare suppression between the novel variant we have developed and the traditional one
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