Invisibility

Invisibility is the state of an object that cannot be seen. An object in this state is said to be invisible (literally, "not visible"). The phenomenon is studied by physics and perceptual psychology. Since objects can be seen by light in the visible spectrum from a source reflecting off their surfaces and hitting the viewer's eye, the most natural form of invisibility (whether real or fictional) is an object that neither reflects nor absorbs light (that is, it allows light to pass through it). This is known as transparency, and is seen in many naturally occurring materials (although no naturally occurring material is 100% transparent). Invisibility perception depends on several optical and visual factors. For example, invisibility depends on the eyes of the observer and/or the instruments used. Thus an object can be classified as "invisible to" a person, animal, instrument, etc. In research on sensorial perception it has been shown that invisibility is perceived in cycles. Invis

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Temporal structure coding with and without awareness

Nathan Quentin Faivre

In order to interpret a constantly changing environment, visual events far apart in space and time must be integrated into a unified percept. While spatial properties of invisible signals are known to be encoded without awareness, the fate of temporal properties remains largely unknown. Here, we probed temporal integration for two distinct motion stimuli that were either visible or rendered invisible using continuous flash suppression. We found that when invisible, both the direction of apparent motion and the gender of point-light walkers were processed only when defined across short time periods (i.e., respectively 100 ms and 1000 ms). This limitation was not observed under full visibility. These similar findings at two different hierarchical levels of processing suggest that temporal integration windows shrink in the absence of perceptual awareness. We discuss this phenomenon as a key prediction of the global neuronal workspace and the information integration theories of consciousness.

Elsevier2014

Low-level awareness accompanies “unconscious” high-level processing during continuous flash suppression

Nathan Quentin Faivre

The scope and limits of unconscious processing are a matter of ongoing debate. Lately, continuous flash suppression (CFS), a technique for suppressing visual stimuli, has been widely used to demonstrate surprisingly high-level processing of invisible stimuli. Yet, recent studies showed that CFS might actually allow low-level features of the stimulus to escape suppression and be consciously perceived. The influence of such low-level awareness on high-level processing might easily go unnoticed, as studies usually only probe the visibility of the feature of interest, and not that of lower-level features. For instance, face identity is held to be processed unconsciously since subjects who fail to judge the identity of suppressed faces still show identity priming effects. Here we challenge these results, showing that such high-level priming effects are indeed induced by faces whose identity is invisible, but critically, only when a lower-level feature, such as color or location, is visible. No evidence for identity processing was found when subjects had no conscious access to any feature of the suppressed face. These results suggest that high-level processing of an image might be enabled by-or co-occur with-conscious access to some of its low-level features, even when these features are not relevant to the processed dimension. Accordingly, they call for further investigation of lower-level awareness during CFS, and reevaluation of other unconscious high-level processing findings.

Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology2016

A direct comparison of unconscious face processing under masking and interocular suppression

Julien Dubois, Nathan Quentin Faivre

Different combinations of forward and backward masking as well as interocular suppression have been used extensively to render stimuli invisible and to study those aspects of visual stimuli that are processed in the absence of conscious experience. Although the two techniques-masking vs. interocular suppression-obviously differ both in their applications and mechanisms, only little effort has been made to compare them systematically. Yet, such a comparison is crucial: existing discrepancies in the extent of unconscious processing inferred from these two techniques must be reconciled, as our understanding of unconscious vision should be independent of the technique used to prevent visibility. Here, we studied similarities and differences between faces rendered invisible by masking vs. interocular suppression using a priming paradigm. By carefully equating stimulus strength across the two techniques, we analyzed the effects of face primes with the same viewpoint (repetition priming, Experiment 1) and of face primes with a different viewpoint (identity priming, Experiment 2) on the reaction times for a fame categorization task. Overall, we found that the magnitude of both repetition and identity priming largely depended on stimulus visibility. Moreover, when the primes were subjectively invisible, both repetition and identity priming were found to be qualitatively stronger under masking than under interocular suppression. Taken together, these results help refine our understanding of which level of visual processing each technique disrupts, and illustrate the importance of systematic methodological comparisons in the field of unconscious vision.

Frontiers Research Foundation2014