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Updated: Jul 2, 2026

A Gaze-Contingent Display Framework for Perceptual Learning Research with Simulated Central Vision Loss
Published on: April 11, 2025
"Perceptual scotomas": a functional account of motion-induced blindness
1Department of Psychology, Yale University, Box 208205, New Haven, CT 06520-8205, USA. joshua.new@yale.edu
Abstract:
In motion-induced blindness (MIB), salient objects in full view can repeatedly fluctuate into and out of conscious awareness when superimposed onto certain global moving patterns. Here we suggest a new account of this striking phenomenon: Rather than being a failure of visual processing, MIB may be a functional product of the visual system's attempt to separate distal stimuli from artifacts of damage to the visual system itself. When a small object is invariant despite changes that are occurring to a global region of the surrounding visual field, the visual system may discount that stimulus as akin to a scotoma, and may thus expunge it from awareness. We describe three experiments demonstrating new phenomena predicted by this account and discuss how it can also explain several previous results.
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