What is the bandwidth of perceptual experience? Evidence from virtual reality
How much information are we aware of in the visual world? While this question appears rather simple, answering it has been remarkably difficult and extremely controversial. Traditionally, researchers examine the limits of perceptual experience by changing individual items in a scene and seeing how often observers notice those changes (e.g., failing to notice a bowl disappearing/changing). Here, we took a different approach and asked how much we could alter an entire scene before observers noticed those global alterations. Specifically, we used a combination of standard psychophysics (i.e., computer displays) and gaze-contingent virtual reality (i.e., VR) to alter the scenes in one of two ways: 1) desaturating the periphery to render it entirely in black and white or 2) scrambling the periphery so much that no object could be detected or identified. Surprisingly, we found that observers routinely failed to notice drastic changes to that scene (e.g., presenting only 5% of the world in color while the rest was black and white, completely scrambling the periphery of a scene, etc.). Together, these results suggest that perceptual experience may be remarkably impoverished and that our intuitive sense of a detailed, colorful world is surprisingly incorrect.