Mid-level perceptual features, and not ambiguity, accelerate access to awareness

Current theoretical accounts of perception and high-level cognition suggest that awareness plays an active role in disambiguating incoming sensory information. However, the relationship between ambiguity resolution and conscious access remains unclear, partially due to a lack of quantifiable measures of ambiguity. Here, we describe a novel paradigm designed for testing whether more ambiguous stimuli would enjoy preferential access to awareness, as indexed by the time it takes them to break interocular suppression in the breaking continuous flash suppression paradigm. In a series of three experiments, we found that stimuli's mid-level perceptual features (most likely, visual symmetry levels), rather than their ambiguity, facilitated access to awareness. We therefore propose that such features can drive preferential access to awareness and hypothesize that the potential effect of symmetry might be driven by information redundancy due to the invariance of symmetric patterns under geometric transformation.