What modern vision science reveals about the awareness puzzle: Summary-statistic encoding plus decision limits underlie the richness of visual perception and its quirky failures

TL;DR

This paper proposes that the apparent discrepancy between our rich visual experience and limited perceptual awareness can be explained by summary-statistic encoding and decision thresholds, resolving the awareness puzzle.

Contribution

It introduces a unified framework based on summary-statistic encoding and decision limits to explain visual perception and its failures, challenging previous notions of an awareness puzzle.

Findings

Summary-statistic encoding accounts for rich visual experience.

Decision thresholds explain perceptual limitations.

Unified explanation resolves the awareness puzzle.

Abstract

There is a fundamental puzzle in understanding our awareness of the visual world. On one hand, our subjective experience is one of a rich visual world, which we perceive effortlessly. However, when we actually test perception, observers know surprisingly little. A number of tasks, from search, through inattentional blindness, to change blindness, suggest that there is surprisingly little awareness or perception without attention. Meanwhile, another set of tasks, such as multiple object tracking, dual-task performance, and visual working memory tasks suggest that both attention and working memory have low capacity. These two components together - poor perception without attention, and greatly limited capacity for attention and memory - imply that perception is impoverished. How can we make sense of this awareness puzzle, of the riddle of our rich subjective experience coupled with poor performance on experimental tasks? I suggest that, looked at in the right way, there is in fact no awareness puzzle. In particular, I will argue that the tasks that show limits are inherently difficult tasks, and that there exists a unified explanation for both the rich subjective experience and the apparent limits.