Reverse-breaking CFS (rev-bCFS): Disentangling conscious and unconscious effects by measuring suppression and dominance times during continuous flash suppression

Abstract

Breaking continuous flash suppression (bCFS) is a widely used experimental paradigm that exploits detection tasks to measure the time an initially invisible stimulus requires to escape interocular suppression and access awareness. One pretty contentious and unresolved issue is whether differences in detection times reflect unconscious or conscious processing. To answer this question, here we introduce a novel approach (i.e., reverse-bCFS [rev-bCFS]) that measures the time an initially visible stimulus requires to be suppressed from awareness. Results from two experiments using face stimuli indicate that rev-bCFS can capture conscious effects, which indicates that contrasting standard bCFS with rev-bCFS can isolate unconscious processing occurring specifically during bCFS. For example, while face inversion impacted both bCFS and rev-bCFS, effects were larger in bCFS, suggesting a distinct contribution of unconscious processing to the advantage of upright over inverted faces in accessing awareness. Combining standard bCFS and rev-bCFS may offer a fruitful approach able to disentangle conscious and unconscious effects occurring during interocular suppression.