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Updated: Sep 22, 2025
08:05
Testing Tactile Masking between the Forearms
Published on: February 10, 2016
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High confidence and low accuracy in redundancy masking.
Fazilet Zeynep Yildirim1, Bilge Sayim2
1Institute of Psychology, University of Bern, Fabrikstrasse 8, 3012 Bern, Switzerland.
Consciousness and Cognition
|May 22, 2022
Summary
Visual perception can trick you. Redundancy masking, a visual system process, makes people overconfident in incorrect judgments, especially with radial patterns, impacting visual consciousness.
Area of Science:
- Visual Neuroscience
- Perception Psychology
Background:
- Visual scenes contain redundant information, which the visual system compresses.
- Redundancy masking reduces perceived items in repeating patterns, particularly in radial arrangements.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the relationship between redundancy masking and confidence in perceptual judgments.
- To determine if erroneous perceptions due to redundancy masking are reported with higher confidence.
Main Methods:
- Observers viewed 3-7 lines arranged radially or tangentially at 10° eccentricity.
- Participants reported the number of lines perceived and rated their confidence.
Main Results:
- Redundancy masking was strong in radial and weak in tangential arrangements.
- With radial patterns, observers were more confident when reporting fewer lines (masking occurred) than the correct number.
- Confidence was not affected by redundancy masking in tangential arrangements.
Conclusions:
- Strong redundancy masking is associated with higher confidence in erroneous perceptual judgments.
- Redundancy-masked perception can override veridical perception, leading to overconfidence.
- Overconfidence in visual perception may contribute to the richness of conscious experience.
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