A global attentional scope setting prioritizes faces for conscious detection

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Attentional scope influences object perception, with global scope enhancing holistic face processing.
• Recent research suggests attentional scope may also modulate information availability for conscious awareness.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how attentional scope affects the availability of information for conscious visual awareness.
• To determine if attentional scope modulates the speed of conscious face detection.

Main Methods:

• Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS) to render faces initially invisible.
• Participants adopted either a global or local attentional scope.
• Measurement of conscious detection time for faces under CFS and a non-rivalrous control condition.
• Testing with upright faces, inverted faces, and houses.

Main Results:

• Global attentional scope significantly accelerated conscious detection of invisible faces under CFS.
• Attentional scope did not affect face detection time in a non-rivalrous control condition.
• The effect was specific to upright faces and abolished with inverted faces or houses.

Conclusions:

• Attentional scope settings dynamically modulate the availability of visual information to conscious awareness.
• This modulation fundamentally alters the contents of subjective visual experience.
• The findings highlight the role of attention in shaping conscious perception, particularly for faces.