Abstract
Continuous flash suppression (CFS) is a psychophysical technique where a rapidly changing Mondrian pattern viewed in one eye suppresses the target in the other eye for several seconds. Despite its widespread use in the study of awareness and unconscious processing, the temporal tuning of CFS remains surprisingly unknown. Previous studies have examined the effect of varying the Mondrian refresh rate, but this is not equivalent to manipulating temporal frequency in a pattern that varies randomly in luminance from frame to frame. In this study, we map the temporal frequency tuning of CFS using temporally narrow, bandpass-filtered noise maskers. Our results show that, contrary to common assumption, slower masker refresh rates (e.g., 0.75-1.5 Hz) supress targets for longer durations compared to faster masker refresh rates (e.g., 10 Hz and above). These results seem to reflect a parvocellular bias in CFS, since the low temporal frequency trend was more pronounced with high spatial frequency targets compared to low spatial frequency targets. In addition, raising masker contrast was found to increase suppression duration, but only if the masker modulated at a low temporal frequency (i.e., 2 Hz).
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2016