Breaking Continuous Flash Suppression: A New Measure of Unconscious Processing during Interocular Suppression?

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Historically, high-level visual processing was believed to be abolished under interocular suppression.
• Continuous flash suppression (CFS) challenges this, showing high-level stimulus features influence awareness.
• The breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS) paradigm infers unconscious processing from differential detection speeds under suppression versus control conditions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To critically evaluate the assumptions of the b-CFS paradigm.
• To determine if non-rivalrous control conditions accurately isolate unconscious processing effects.
• To assess the validity of using detection latency differences to infer unconscious visual processing under CFS.

Main Methods:

• Six experiments compared the detection of upright and inverted faces.
• Utilized both CFS and non-rivalrous control conditions.
• Analyzed reaction time (RT) distributions and subjective perceptual ratings.

Main Results:

• Upright faces were detected faster and more accurately than inverted faces in both CFS and control conditions, with a larger effect under CFS.
• When RT distributions were matched, effect sizes were similar across CFS and control conditions.
• Subjective ratings indicated that CFS and control conditions are not perceptually equivalent.

Conclusions:

• Findings question the utility of non-rivalrous controls in ruling out non-specific threshold differences in the b-CFS paradigm.
• The b-CFS paradigm, in its current form, does not provide unequivocal evidence for unconscious processing during interocular suppression.
• The b-CFS paradigm remains a sensitive tool for probing stimulus differences in their potential to reach awareness.