Learning of monocular information facilitates breakthrough to awareness during interocular suppression

Abstract

Continuous flash suppression (CFS) is a potent method of inducing binocular rivalry, wherein a rapid succession of high-contrast images presented to one eye effectively blocks from awareness a low-contrast image presented to the other eye. Here we addressed whether the contents of the suppressed image can break through to awareness with extended CFS exposure. On 2/3 of the trials, we presented a faint bar (the target) to the nondominant eye while a high-contrast flickering Mondrian (the mask) was displayed to the dominant eye. Participants were first asked to report whether the target had broken through the CFS mask. Furthermore, on targetpresent trials, the participants were then asked to guess whether the target had appeared above or below the fixation point. In Experiment 1, the target was presented with a fixed orientation for four blocks of trials, whereas in the fifth block, the target could also have the orthogonal orientation. In Experiment 2, the target was always presented with a fixed orientation, but in the fifth block, unbeknownst to participants, the target and the mask were swapped across the eyes. We found that awareness of the target rapidly improved with training in both experiments. However, whereas Experiment 1 revealed that the improvement largely generalized across stimulus orientations, Experiment 2 showed that the effect of practice was eye-specific. The results suggest that increased breakthrough with training was due to a monocular form of learning. Finally, a control experiment was conducted to exclude the possibility that the monocular learning we reported could have been due to sensory adaptation caused by the masks.

Serial correlations in Continuous Flash Suppression

“…This observation is well in line with other CFS studies highlighting that adaptation, perceptual learning, and stimulus-reward learning are primarily monocular (Seitz et al. , 2009; Stein and Sterzer, 2011; Mastropasqua et al. , 2015).…”

Attention-based perceptual learning does not affect access to awareness

“…A faster perceptual transition from the CFS mask to the moving dots would then resemble a faster switch rate for images engaged in binocular rivalry after repeated exposure. The results also resemble those of Mastropasqua et al (2015), who reported that the chance of detecting a stimulus suppressed by CFS increases after repeated exposure with a single session. In that study, observers were instructed to detect a bar after a 3-s suppression by CFS in repeating blocks.…”

Ventral and Dorsal Pathways Relate Differently to Visual Awareness of Body Postures under Continuous Flash Suppression

“…This participant was excluded from the analysis. The decrease of stimuli suppression efficiency for this participant might be the same effect reported by a few previous CFS studies, where participants saw more stimuli as the experiment progressed ( Ludwig et al, 2013 ; Lupyan and Ward, 2013 ; Mastropasqua et al, 2015 ; Stein and Peelen, 2015 ).…”