Abstract
In the last few decades, conscious perception has been studied in healthy subjects by rendering stimuli invisible using different methods. Thus far, these stimuli were presented on screen, and were accordingly limited to words, objects or pictures. We present a method which allows, for the first time, to study the unconscious visual processing of real stimuli in the real world, such as actual objects, human faces, food items etc. We developed a novel variant of Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS), a method that was thus far used to suppress on-screen stimuli from awareness. Our variant, real-life CFS, presents CFS masks on augmented reality goggles, hereby suppressing parts of the subjects' immediate surrounding. Therefore, manipulable, interactable and even animate stimuli can be rendered invisible to the subject. Here, we used real-life CFS to probe the difference between the visual processing of real objects and that of 2D images, and found that real objects emerge into subjects' awareness about a second before their 2D, pictorial counterparts. 3D printed models were then used to further explore the source of this difference. In this talk, we will present the new technique and the possible mechanisms of unconscious processing of real-life objects vs. their 2D pictorial representations.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2018