Depth of Processing of Visual Scenes Not Consciously Perceived

Our visual system grants us a remarkable ability to appreciate the world both accurately and rapidly. However, imperfections in our visual system exist as characterized by effects such as attentional blink: the inability to detect one stimulus when attention was directed to a previously presented stimulus. We do not yet know whether this inability is perceptual or whether it comes from later decision-making processes. Using neural decoding methods, we examined the extent to which these missed stimuli were processed by the brain. Specifically, we are interested in knowing if we can decode the category information of the fruit images that are missed during the attentional blink from the EEG recording using the Support Vector Machine. In the end, we were not able to obtain any statistically significant decoding on the categorical information of the missed fruit image either from the preprocessed EEG data directly or from the Fourier decomposition on the EEG data. Thus, the project does not provide sufficient evidence on the semantic-level processing of the fruit images that were missed during the attentional blink