ISSN 0439-755X
CN 11-1911/B

Acta Psychologica Sinica ›› 2022, Vol. 54 ›› Issue (7): 725-735.doi: 10.3724/SP.J.1041.2022.00725

• Reports of Empirical Studies •     Next Articles

A method for studying unconscious motion processing based on the camouflage principle

ZHAO Jiaxu1,2, BAO Min1,2()   

  1. 1CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China
    2Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
  • Received:2021-09-15 Published:2022-07-25 Online:2022-05-19
  • Contact: BAO Min E-mail:baom@psych.ac.cn
  • Supported by:
    National Natural Science Foundation of China(31871104);National Natural Science Foundation of China(31830037);Key Laboratory of behavioral sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences(Y5CX052003);undergraduate scientific research fund of the Institute of Psychology, the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Abstract:

The present study introduces a new continuous flash suppression (CFS) paradigm. We used the principle of alpha blending to keep the color of the target stimuli always consistent with that of the masking stimuli. We randomly recruited eight participants. Their dominant eyes were presented with the regular CFS masks. Meanwhile the non-dominant eyes were presented with ten spatially non-overlapping squares moving at a constant velocity. The results showed that the CFS masks in this new paradigm could efficiently block the conscious processing of the multiple moving targets. Furthermore, the breakthrough rate was the lowest when the colors of the targets were fully consistent with the colors of the CFS masks. This suggests that the new paradigm is more powerful than the traditional CFS paradigm in masking dynamic stimuli. Compared with the prevalent idea of modifying CFS masks, our method is believed to have broader applicability. Therefore, we recommend the new paradigm a useful tool for future investigations of unconscious visual motion information processing.

Key words: continuous flash suppression, unconscious processing, motion, camouflage, alpha blending