The Analysis of Continuous Flash Suppression

Abstract

The current study is the first to systematically investigate the suppressive characteristics underlying continuous flash suppression (CFS). In a series of experiments, I showed that CFS operates by selectively attenuating or abolishing certain low-level signals while leaving others to be potentially encoded during suppression. This feature-selective bias in suppression may be attributed to the spatio-temporal properties of the CFS stimulus and the properties shared with the suppressed stimulus. Findings from the current study suggest that the process in which CFS erases awareness alters the fidelity of the stimulus representation and underscore the importance of considering the contribution of low-level features in stimulus-driven effects that are reported under suppression. Furthermore, these findings implicate the involvement feature-selective mechanisms in neural concomitants of suppression.