Unconscious Local Motion Alters Global Image Speed

Accurate motion perception of self and object speed is crucial for successful interaction in the world. The context in which we make such speed judgments has a profound effect on their accuracy. Misperceptions of motion speed caused by the context can have drastic consequences in real world situations, but they also reveal much about the underlying mechanisms of motion perception. Here we show that motion signals suppressed from awareness can warp simultaneous conscious speed perception. In Experiment 1, we measured global speed discrimination thresholds using an annulus of 8 local Gabor elements. We show that physically removing local elements from the array attenuated global speed discrimination. However, removing awareness of the local elements only had a small effect on speed discrimination. That is, unconscious local motion elements contributed to global conscious speed perception. In Experiment 2 we measured the global speed of the moving Gabor patterns, when half the elements moved at different speeds. We show that global speed averaging occurred regardless of whether local elements were removed from awareness, such that the speed of invisible elements continued to be averaged together with the visible elements to determine the global speed. These data suggest that contextual motion signals outside of awareness can both boost and affect our experience of motion speed, and suggest that such pooling of motion signals occurs before the conscious extraction of the surround motion speed.