Modelling the Effect of Visual Working Memory on Motion-Induced Blindness

Abstract

We are only aware of relevant visual information, as most available visual information never enters our awareness. The visual working memory (VWM) may play a part in selecting relevant visual information for awareness. To investigate the effect of VWM on our visual awareness, we have designed an experiment to test the influence of the content of VWM on awareness using motion-induced blindness (MIB). Information more likely to enter awareness is prone to disappear from awareness in MIB. As information matching the content of the VWM is more likely to enter awareness, our experiment is designed to investigate whether stimuli matching the content of the VWM are also more likely to disappear in MIB. We have also made two models to predict the effect of the content of VWM on stimulus disappearance in MIB. One of these models is based on the effect of the content of VWM on breaking-continuous flash suppression (bCFS), whereas the other is based on the predicted effect of attention on the disappearance of stimuli in MIB. Using these models, we have created possible distributions of the outcomes of the experiment we designed. Based on these distributions we have also simulated trials for the experiment. Both our models predict an increase in stimulus disappearance for stimuli matching the content of the VWM. The model based on attention assumes that the increase in stimulus disappearance for stimuli matching the content of the VWM greatly diminishes as the contrast between the stimulus and the background increases, whereas the model based on bCFS expects no such interaction between contrast and the content of the VWM.