Continuous flash suppression and monocular pattern masking impact subjective awareness similarly

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Previous research suggested no unconscious visual perception when criterion bias is controlled.
• A criticism of prior work involved the visual suppression method, forward and backward masking (FBM), potentially being too blunt.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare the effectiveness of forward and backward masking (FBM) against continuous flash suppression (CFS) in impairing visual perception.
• To determine if CFS allows for unconscious forced-choice discrimination where FBM might not.

Main Methods:

• A two-interval forced-choice task was employed.
• Forward and backward masking (FBM) and continuous flash suppression (CFS) were used as visual suppression techniques.
• Objective discrimination and subjective awareness were measured.

Main Results:

• No significant difference was found in the degree of perceptual impairment between FBM and CFS.
• Both objective discrimination and subjective awareness were impaired to similar degrees under FBM, mirroring effects under CFS.
• This pattern held across three experiments with varied parameters.

Conclusions:

• Continuous flash suppression (CFS) does not appear to be a more powerful technique for visual suppression than forward and backward masking (FBM).
• The findings support the view that normal observers cannot perform forced-choice discrimination tasks unconsciously.
• The study contributes to the ongoing debate on the existence and mechanisms of unconscious perception.