Conscious Vision Proceeds from Global to Local Content in Goal-Directed Tasks and Spontaneous Vision.
The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience May 11, 2016 Florence Campana, Ignacio Rebollo, Anne Urai et al.
Global information in vision is perceived faster and dominates conscious perception compared to local details, according to a test of the reverse hierarchy theory. Using novel hierarchical stimuli where global orientation is defined solely by local orientation, observers reported global properties faster than local ones. Magnetoencephalography data showed global information was decoded during early visual processing regardless of task demands. Spontaneous subjective reports were dominated by global information, and the frequency and speed of spontaneous global perception correlated with accuracy and speed in the global task, but not the local task. This provides empirical evidence that conscious percepts emerge preferentially at a global level, accounting for the dominance of global percepts and the feeling of visual richness.