title: Motion-induced blindness continues outside visual awareness and without attention.
abstract: Visual phenomena demonstrating striking perceptual disappearances of salient stimuli have fascinated researchers because of their utility in identifying neural processes that underlie subjective visibility and invisibility. Motion-induced blindness (MIB) is appealing for such purposes because it, like a class of ostensibly related paradigms such as binocular rivalry, features periods of unequivocal subjective disappearances despite constant physical stimulation. It remains unclear, however, exactly how the mechanisms that cause MIB are related to subjectively observed fluctuations in visual awareness. To address this question, we used continuous flash suppression (CFS) to present the MIB stimulus outside visual awareness. Results indicated that MIB occasionally reappeared from suppression with its salient yellow target absent. To quantify this observation, we measured reaction times (RTs) to detect the yellow dot target following visible or perceptually suppressed MIB and indeed found no difference in RTs between these conditions. We also provide evidence that MIB fluctuations can occur without attention. In sum, these experiments indicate that MIB fluctuations are effectively changes in stimulus strength, which under typical conditions result in unmistakable subjective disappearances, but are not inherently fluctuations in stimulus visibility. More broadly, these results challenge the assumed privileged link between bistable stimuli and visual awareness.
authors.affiliation: 1] Vanderbilt Vision Research Center and Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN, 37240, USA [2] Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, 14627, USA.
authors.forename: Kevin C
authors.initials: KC
authors.lastname: Dieter
authors.affiliation: 1] Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, 14627, USA [2] Department of Ophthalmology, University of Rochester School of Medicine, Rochester, NY, 14642, USA.
authors.forename: Duje
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Tadin
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2052, Australia.
authors.forename: Joel
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Pearson
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D001364:Awareness; D001766:Blindness / Q000503:physiopathology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009039:Motion Perception; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time