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Non-Conscious Processing of Motion Coherence Can Boost Conscious Access

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  • Lisandro Kaunitz
  • Alessio Fracasso
  • Angelika Lingnau
  • David Melcher

Abstract

Research on the scope and limits of non-conscious vision can advance our understanding of the functional and neural underpinnings of visual awareness. Here we investigated whether distributed local features can be bound, outside of awareness, into coherent patterns. We used continuous flash suppression (CFS) to create interocular suppression, and thus lack of awareness, for a moving dot stimulus that varied in terms of coherence with an overall pattern (radial flow). Our results demonstrate that for radial motion, coherence favors the detection of patterns of moving dots even under interocular suppression. Coherence caused dots to break through the masks more often: this indicates that the visual system was able to integrate low-level motion signals into a coherent pattern outside of visual awareness. In contrast, in an experiment using meaningful or scrambled biological motion we did not observe any increase in the sensitivity of detection for meaningful patterns. Overall, our results are in agreement with previous studies on face processing and with the hypothesis that certain features are spatiotemporally bound into coherent patterns even outside of attention or awareness.

Suggested Citation

  • Lisandro Kaunitz & Alessio Fracasso & Angelika Lingnau & David Melcher, 2013. "Non-Conscious Processing of Motion Coherence Can Boost Conscious Access," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(4), pages 1-5, April.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0060787
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0060787
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Peter Neri & M. Concetta Morrone & David C. Burr, 1998. "Seeing biological motion," Nature, Nature, vol. 395(6705), pages 894-896, October.
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    Cited by:

    1. Weina Zhu & Jan Drewes & David Melcher, 2016. "Time for Awareness: The Influence of Temporal Properties of the Mask on Continuous Flash Suppression Effectiveness," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(7), pages 1-15, July.
    2. Ariel Goldstein & Ido Rivlin & Alon Goldstein & Yoni Pertzov & Ran R Hassin, 2020. "Predictions from masked motion with and without obstacles," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(11), pages 1-35, November.

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