Moors Pieter, Stein Timo, Wagemans Johan, van Ee Raymond
Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, Department of Brain & Cognition, University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium.
Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC), University of Trento, Rovereto, Italy.
Neurosci Conscious. 2015 Dec 31;2015(1):niv010. doi: 10.1093/nc/niv010. eCollection 2015.
Research on visual rivalry has demonstrated that consecutive dominance durations are serially dependent, implying that the underlying competition mechanism is not driven by some random process but includes a memory component. Here we asked whether serial dependence is also observed in continuous flash suppression (CFS). We addressed this question by analyzing a large dataset of time series of suppression durations obtained in a series of so-called "breaking CFS" experiments in which the duration of the period is measured until a suppressed target breaks through the CFS mask. Across experimental manipulations, stimuli, and observers, we found that (i) the distribution of breakthrough rates was fit less well by a gamma distribution than in conventional visual rivalry paradigms, (ii) the suppression duration on a previous trial influenced the suppression duration on a later trial up to as long as a lag of eight trials, and (iii) the mechanism underlying these serial correlations was predominantly monocular. We conclude that the underlying competition mechanism of CFS also includes a memory component that is primarily, but not necessarily exclusively, monocular in nature. We suggest that the temporal dependency structure of suppression durations in CFS is akin to those observed in binocular rivalry, which might imply that both phenomena tap into similar rather than distinct mechanisms.
对视觉竞争的研究表明，连续的优势持续时间是序列相关的，这意味着潜在的竞争机制不是由某种随机过程驱动的，而是包含一个记忆成分。在这里，我们探讨在连续闪光抑制（CFS）中是否也能观察到序列相关性。我们通过分析一系列所谓“打破CFS”实验中获得的抑制持续时间的时间序列的大型数据集来解决这个问题，在这些实验中，测量直到被抑制的目标突破CFS掩蔽的时间段的持续时间。在各种实验操作、刺激和观察者中，我们发现：（i）与传统视觉竞争范式相比，突破率的分布用伽马分布拟合得较差；（ii）前一次试验的抑制持续时间会影响后续试验的抑制持续时间，最长可达八次试验的滞后；（iii）这些序列相关性背后的机制主要是单眼的。我们得出结论，CFS的潜在竞争机制也包括一个记忆成分，该成分主要但不一定完全是单眼性质的。我们认为，CFS中抑制持续时间的时间依赖性结构类似于在双眼竞争中观察到的结构，这可能意味着这两种现象利用的是相似而非不同的机制。
