Institute of Psychology, University of Bern, Fabrikstrasse 8, 3012 Bern, Switzerland.
Institute of Psychology, University of Bern, Fabrikstrasse 8, 3012 Bern, Switzerland; SCALab - Sciences Cognitives et Sciences Affectives, CNRS, UMR 9193, University of Lille, 59000 Lille, France.
Conscious Cogn. 2022 Jul;102:103349. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2022.103349. Epub 2022 May 19.
Visual scenes typically contain redundant information. One mechanism by which the visual system compresses such redundancies is 'redundancy masking' - the reduction of the perceived number of items in repeating patterns. For example, when presented with three lines in the periphery, observers frequently report only two lines. Redundancy masking is strong in radial arrangements and absent in tangential arrangements. Previous studies suggested that redundancy-masked percepts predominate in stimuli susceptible to redundancy masking. Here, we investigated whether strong redundancy masking is associated with high confidence in perceptual judgements. Observers viewed three to seven radially or tangentially arranged lines at 10° eccentricity. They first indicated the number of lines, and then rated their confidence in their responses. As expected, redundancy masking was strong in radial arrangements and weak in tangential arrangements. Importantly, with radial arrangements, observers were more confident in their responses when redundancy masking occurred (i.e., lower number of lines reported) than when it did not occur (i.e., correct number of lines reported). Hence, observers reported higher confidence for erroneous than for correct judgments. In contrast, with tangential arrangements, observers were similarly confident in their responses whether redundancy masking occurred or not. The inversion of confidence in the radial condition (higher confidence when accuracy was low and lower confidence when accuracy was high) suggests that redundancy-masked appearance trumps 'veridical' perception. The often-reported richness of visual consciousness may partly be due to overconfidence in erroneous judgments in visual scenes that are subject to redundancy masking.
视觉场景通常包含冗余信息。视觉系统压缩这些冗余信息的一种机制是“冗余掩蔽”——减少重复模式中感知到的项目数量。例如，当在周边呈现三条线时，观察者经常报告只有两条线。在放射状排列中，冗余掩蔽很强，而在切线排列中则不存在。先前的研究表明，在容易受到冗余掩蔽影响的刺激中，冗余掩蔽的感知占主导地位。在这里，我们研究了强冗余掩蔽是否与感知判断的高置信度相关。观察者在 10°的偏心位置观看三到七条放射状或切线排列的线。他们首先指出线的数量，然后对他们的反应置信度进行评级。正如预期的那样，在放射状排列中，冗余掩蔽很强，而在切线排列中则很弱。重要的是，在放射状排列中，当发生冗余掩蔽（即报告的线数较少）时，观察者对其反应的信心高于不发生冗余掩蔽（即报告正确的线数）时的信心。因此，观察者对错误判断的报告信心高于正确判断。相比之下，在切线排列中，无论是否发生冗余掩蔽，观察者对其反应的信心都相似。在放射状条件下，信心的反转（准确性低时信心高，准确性高时信心低）表明，冗余掩蔽的外观优于“真实”感知。视觉意识的丰富性经常被报道，这可能部分归因于对受到冗余掩蔽影响的视觉场景中的错误判断的过度自信。
