Laboratory of Primate Cognitive Neuroscience, Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, Yunnan, China.
PLoS One. 2012;7(3):e33053. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0033053. Epub 2012 Mar 22.
Mounting psychophysical evidence suggests that early visual computations are sensitive to the topological properties of stimuli, such as the determination of whether the object has a hole or not. Previous studies have demonstrated that the hole feature took some advantages during conscious perception. In this study, we investigate whether there exists a privileged processing for hole stimuli during unconscious perception. By applying a continuous flash suppression paradigm, the target was gradually introduced to one eye to compete against a flashed full contrast Mondrian pattern which was presented to the other eye. This method ensured that the target image was suppressed during the initial perceptual period. We compared the initial suppressed duration between the stimuli with and without the hole feature and found that hole stimuli required less time than no-hole stimuli to gain dominance against the identical suppression noise. These results suggest the hole feature could be processed in the absence of awareness, and there exists a privileged detection of hole stimuli during suppressed phase in the interocular rivalry.
越来越多的心理物理学证据表明，早期视觉计算对刺激的拓扑性质敏感，例如确定物体是否有孔。先前的研究表明，在意识知觉中，孔特征具有一定的优势。在这项研究中，我们调查了在无意识知觉中是否存在对孔刺激的特殊加工。通过应用连续闪光抑制范式，目标逐渐引入一只眼睛，与另一只眼睛呈现的全对比度蒙德里安图案进行竞争。这种方法确保了在初始感知期间抑制目标图像。我们比较了有孔和无孔刺激的初始抑制持续时间，发现孔刺激比无孔刺激需要更少的时间来获得对相同抑制噪声的优势。这些结果表明，即使在没有意识的情况下，孔特征也可以被加工，并且在双眼竞争的抑制阶段，对孔刺激存在特殊的检测。
