Valuch, C. Color Can Shorten Breakthrough Times in Continuous Flash Suppression through Increased Salience and Task Relevance. Vision2021, 5, 13.
Valuch, C. Color Can Shorten Breakthrough Times in Continuous Flash Suppression through Increased Salience and Task Relevance. Vision 2021, 5, 13.
Valuch, C. Color Can Shorten Breakthrough Times in Continuous Flash Suppression through Increased Salience and Task Relevance. Vision2021, 5, 13.
Valuch, C. Color Can Shorten Breakthrough Times in Continuous Flash Suppression through Increased Salience and Task Relevance. Vision 2021, 5, 13.
Abstract
Color can direct visual attention to specific locations through bottom-up and top-down mechanisms. Using Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS) as way to investigate the factors that gate access to consciousness, the current study investigated whether color also directly affected the timing of conscious perception. Low or high spatial frequency (SF) gratings with different orientations were shown as targets to the non-dominant eye of human participants. CFS patterns were presented at a rate of 10Hz to the dominant eye to delay conscious perception of the targets, and participants had the task to report the target’s orientation as soon as they could see it. With low-SF targets, two types of color-based effects became evident. First, when the targets and the CFS patterns had different colors, the targets entered consciousness faster than in trials where the targets and CFS patterns had the same color. Second, when participants searched for a specific target color, targets that matched these search settings entered consciousness faster compared to conditions where the target color was irrelevant and could vary from trial to trial. Thus, the current study demonstrates that color is a central feature of human perception and leads to faster conscious perception of visual stimuli through bottom-up and top-down attentional mechanisms.
Keywords
interocular suppression; consciousness; color vision; visual search; attentional templates; early visual system; awareness; continuous flash suppression; binocoular rivalry
Subject
Social Sciences, Psychology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
