Mid-level Perceptual Features, and Not Ambiguity, Accelerate Access to Awareness

Authors

Nadav Amir, Tel Aviv University
Uri Maoz, Chapman UniversityFollow
Liad Mudrik, Tel Aviv University

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-20-2026

Abstract

Current theoretical accounts of perception and high-level cognition suggest that awareness plays an active role in disambiguating incoming sensory information. However, the relationship between ambiguity resolution and conscious access remains unclear, partially due to a lack of quantifiable measures of ambiguity. Here, we describe a novel paradigm designed for testing whether more ambiguous stimuli would enjoy preferential access to awareness, as indexed by the time it takes them to break interocular suppression in the breaking continuous flash suppression paradigm. In a series of three experiments, we found that stimuli’s mid-level perceptual features (most likely, visual symmetry levels), rather than their ambiguity, facilitated access to awareness. We therefore propose that such features can drive preferential access to awareness and hypothesize that the potential effect of symmetry might be driven by information redundancy due to the invariance of symmetric patterns under geometric transformation.

Comments

This article was originally published in Neuroscience of Consciousness, volume 2026, issue 1, in 2026. 

https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niag006

Recommended Citation

Nadav Amir, Uri Maoz, Liad Mudrik, Mid-level perceptual features, and not ambiguity, accelerate access to awareness, Neuroscience of Consciousness, Volume 2026, Issue 1, 2026, niag006, https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niag006

Copyright

The authors

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.