Abstract
Is our perceptual experience at a glance rich and detailed following the retinal resolution, regardless of the limited capacity of cognitive access (e.g., the bottleneck of attention or working memory)? To answer this question, we investigated observers’ perceptual resolution of an individual face when they saw either a single face (“single-face condition”) or eight faces at once (“multiple-face condition”). We characterized the perceptual resolution by using a degradation detection task measuring how accurately observers detected the degradation of a face (i.e., loss of higher spatial frequency information). In Experiment 1, we found that observers were more likely to miss the degradation of a face in the multiple-face condition and that this degradation blindness happened more often for faces presented along the vertical than horizontal meridians. In Experiment 2, we investigated whether the degradation blindness in the multiple-face condition resulted from complete blindness to a degraded face or partial blindness to the details of the face (i.e., high spatial frequency information). To do this, we measured degradation detection performance across a wide range of degradation levels of a face for the single- and multiple-face conditions. If observers experienced complete blindness to a degraded face, they would not be able to detect degradation regardless of how extreme the degradation level is. However, we found that, in the multiple-face condition, observers were able to detect extreme levels of degradation as well as in the single-face condition but were more likely to miss mild levels of degradation, supporting the partial blindness hypothesis. Together, our findings suggest that our perceptual experience can be limited by the information bottleneck and that this limited perceptual experience can be explained by partial blindness to the visual world, blindness to not only a part of multiple items but also a part of each item.