Unconscious processing of naturalistic scenes revealed by eye movement dynamics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The scope of unconscious processing is continuously debated. Here, we focus on scene processing without awareness: During conscious scene processing, the eyes are attracted to meaningful and visually salient areas, yet it is unknown if this occurs for unconscious processing. In two preregistered experiments, fifty-two participants were instructed to freely view scenes presented consciously or unconsciously with Continuous Flash Suppression stimulation. For invisible scenes, participants gazed more, but not longer, on objects and emotional faces, and were attracted to areas that are both semantically and visually salient. However, a comparison of eye movements with a Convolutional Neural Network mimicking the human visual ventral pathway revealed that unconscious gaze patterns correlated only with layers corresponding with early visual processes, while conscious patterns correlated also with higher-level layers. This suggests that even without awareness, the eyes are attracted to meaningful areas in scenes, though such processing is limited compared to conscious viewing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".