The Breaking Continuous Flash Suppression Paradigm

Abstract

Continuous flash suppression (CFS), and in particular the so-called breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS) paradigm, has become one of the most influential approaches for studying unconscious visual processing. In the b-CFS paradigm unconscious processing is inferred from the time different stimuli need to overcome CFS and break into awareness. A large body of literature using b-CFS now suggests that the extent of unconscious processing is greater than previously thought. Although b-CFS is widely adopted, its conceptual foundations have not been clearly laid out and its validity has not been evaluated. Here, I compare the b-CFS paradigm to conventional approaches for measuring unconscious processing, and provide a comprehensive overview of b-CFS studies including their key findings, tasks, measures, and controls. This review shows that b-CFS findings could have been confounded by perceptual and post-perceptual influences unrelated to unconscious processing. Two novel approaches are proposed that can help avoiding these issues in future studies. These new detection paradigms can provide more unequivocal evidence for unconscious processing, and they are not tied to CFS but can be used with other masking techniques as well.