How much can we differentiate at a brief glance: Revealing the truer limit in conscious contents through the Massive Report Paradigm (MRP)

Upon a brief glance, how well can we differentiate what we see from what we do not? Previous studies answered this question as “poorly”. This is in stark contrast with our everyday experience. Here, we consider the possibility that previous restriction in stimulus variability and response alternatives reduced what participants could express from what they consciously experienced. We introduce a novel Massive Report paradigm that probes the ability to differentiate what we see from what we do not. In each trial, participants viewed a natural scene image and judged whether a small image patch was a part of the original image. To examine the limit of discriminability, we also included subtler changes in the image as modification of objects. Neither the images nor patches were repeated per participant. Our results showed that participants were highly accurate (accuracy > 80%) in differentiating patches from the viewed images from patches that are not present. Additionally, the differenti...