Conscious Awareness Across the Visual Field

Visual experience feels seamless and complete, yet evidence shows that a surprising amount of information regularly goes unnoticed. Three of the largest bottlenecks constraining visual processing include retinal sampling, cortical organization, and attentional selection. The perceptual consequences of these bottlenecks are revealed by phenomena such as inattentional blindness and visual crowding. How can the feeling of a rich perceptual world coexist with results showing that observers notice very little? Although there is a historical divide between theoretical frameworks debating this question, a review of the contemporary literature suggests that this gap may be closing. Proponents on both sides have refined their positions over the past few decades, and what once appeared to be a fundamental disagreement about the nature of visual phenomenology may actually be reducible to smaller differences. This review examines the mechanisms that limit perceptual processing, explores the empirical and theoretical developments pointing toward convergence, and highlights the remaining differences.