Continuous flash suppression: Known and unknowns.

Continuous flash suppression (CFS) is a technique used to study conscious and nonconscious perception, but key questions remain about how it suppresses visual information and what level of visual processing can occur without awareness. This review evaluates how different experimental setups and methods for assessing consciousness affect results in CFS studies. Evidence indicates that low-level visual information can survive suppression and be processed nonconsciously, while high-level visual recognition is completely impaired under CFS. The authors conclude there is no evidence for nonconscious high-level recognition with this technique.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Studies utilizing continuous flash suppression (CFS) provide valuable information regarding conscious and nonconscious perception. There are, however, crucial unanswered questions regarding the mechanisms of suppression and the level of visual processing in the absence of consciousness with CFS. Research suggests that the answers to these questions depend on the experimental configuration and how we assess consciousness in these studies. The aim of this review is to evaluate the impact of different experimental configurations and the assessment of consciousness on the results of the previous CFS studies. We review studies that evaluated the influence of different experimental configuration on the depth of suppression with CFS and discuss how different assessments of consciousness may impact the results of CFS studies. Finally, we review behavioral and brain recording studies of CFS. In conclusion, previous studies provide evidence for survival of low-level visual information and complete impairment of high-level visual information under the influence of CFS. That is, studies suggest that nonconscious perception of lower-level visual information happens with CFS, but there is no evidence for nonconscious high-level recognition with CFS.