What modern vision science reveals about the awareness puzzle: Summary-statistic encoding plus decision limits underlie the richness of visual perception and its quirky failures

Introduction There is a fundamental puzzle in understanding our awareness of the visual world. On one hand, our subjective experience is one of a rich visual world, which we perceive effortlessly. However, when we actually test perception, observers know surprisingly little (Figure 1). A number of tasks, from search, through inattentional blindness, to change blindness, suggest that there is surprisingly little awareness or perception without attention (e.g. Treisman and Gelade, 1980; Mack and Rock, 1998; Rensink, O’Regan, and Clark, 1997). Meanwhile, another set of tasks, such as multiple object tracking (MOT), dual-task performance, and visual working memory (VWM) tasks suggest that both attention and working memory have low capacity (e.g. Scimeca and Franconeri, 2015; VanRullen, Reddy, and Koch, 2004; Luck and Vogel, 2013). These two components together – poor perception without attention, and greatly limited capacity for attention and memory – imply that perception is impoverished. Throughout, I refer to this combination of rich subjective experience and poor task performance as “the awareness puzzle,” though of course it is far from the only puzzle when it comes to understanding awareness.