Investigating the role of sensorimotor spatial dependencies in shaping conscious access to virtual 3D objects

Abstract

According to sensorimotor accounts of perceptual experience, the subjective sense that an object is real builds up as one learns how sensory inputs depend on bodily movements. Using virtual reality (VR), we manipulated the complexity of spatial dependencies governing interactions with unfamiliar 3D objects to assess whether they would show differential access to visual awareness during a continuous flash suppression paradigm (CFS). In specially-designed sensorimotor mastery tasks, participants had to manually control objects rotating in congruent, opposite, novel (orthogonal), or random directions in response to their actions. These tasks alternated with a continuous flash suppression task, in which participants first indicated stimulus detection as quickly as possible and subsequently identified its shape, evaluating the access of stationary objects to visual awareness. We hypothesised that objects governed by lawful (learnable) dependencies would overcome suppression faster than randomly moving objects (for which there is no world-related statistical structure to learn). While sensorimotor control performance decreased with condition difficulty, the pre-registered analysis yielded no differences in breakthrough times across conditions. We discuss methodological factors, stemming from the dual-task CFS design, which potentially account for these null findings and which warrant further study. Overall, our findings are consistent with prior evidence for the negligible role of spatial congruence (compared to contingency) between actions and their visual consequences in shaping perceptual experience under interocular suppression paradigms.