Learning to discriminate the eye-of-origin during continuous flash suppression.

Area of Science:

• Visual perception
• Neuroscience
• Cognitive psychology

Background:

• Determining the eye-of-origin from retinal signals alone is challenging.
• Perceptual eye-of-origin discrimination often relies on contextual cues.
• Exogenous attention can improve performance with monocular stimuli.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if adults can be trained to discriminate visual perception's eye-of-origin.
• To assess if training effectiveness depends on monocular channel strength.
• To explore the role of metacognition in eye-of-origin judgments.

Main Methods:

• Attentional feed-forward training with voluntary attention.
• Binocular cues provided during training to indicate target eye-of-origin.
• Continuous flash suppression used to measure monocular target signal strength.
• Collection of confidence ratings for eye-of-origin judgments.

Main Results:

• Eye-of-origin discrimination performance improved after training.
• Voluntary attention did not significantly alter monocular channel signal strength.
• Confidence ratings showed a similar improvement pattern to performance.
• No modulation of signal strength by cues was observed via continuous flash suppression.

Conclusions:

• Training enhances eye-of-origin discrimination ability.
• Improved performance and confidence suggest a high-level decisional mechanism.
• This mechanism likely utilizes subtle sensory cues like luminance or contrast differences.
• Metacognitive access to eye-of-origin information is supported by confidence ratings.