Abstract
Continuous flash suppression has been widely used to study unconscious processing due to its sustained and strong suppressive power. However, whether high-level cognitive processing can penetrate such strong suppression remains a matter of debate. Here we addressed this issue by asking whether individual color preference plays a role in color processing under suppression. In the first experiment, across six colors matched for physical luminance, we measured the time taken for each color to break through suppression and reach conscious awareness. We showed an increase of suppression time from the most preferred color to the least preferred color, suggesting that preference plays a role in how a color reaches conscious awareness. In the second experiment, we selected the most and least preferred colors of each individual participant and matched their perceptual luminance with the minimum motion paradigm. Each round color patch was later interocularly suppressed and presented as an exogenous distractor in the same or different location where a subsequent Gabor patch was presented. Participants were instructed to indicate visibility of the color patch. If no color patch was detected, subsequently, they were instructed to judge the orientation of the Gabor patch. The location of the suppressed distractor was not indicative of the Gabor patch, and its invisibility was later confirmed by chance performance on a location task in every trial. We found a same-location subliminal color distractor significantly slowed down the response time on the subsequent orientation judgment. However, this distracting effect occurred regardless of which color distractor was presented, suggesting that color preference did not exert an additional effect. Overall, these results showed attentional modulation from an unconscious distractor but inconclusive color preference effect under interocular suppression.