Finding meaning in “wrong responses”: The multiple object-awareness paradigm shows that visual awareness is probabilistic

Visual information that observers perceive and remember at any given moment guides behavior in daily life. However, binary alternative-forced choice responses, often used in visual research, limit the report of the visual information that observers perceive and remember. We used a new multiple object-awareness paradigm where observers can use multiple clicks to find a target. We calculated visual awareness capacity based on the first-attempt accuracy and the total number of clicks, respectively. Results showed that the capacity estimated by the clicks in guessing from N was significantly greater than that estimated by the first-attempt accuracy. Further, analysis found that if observers could not locate the target in their first attempt, they were more likely to click closer to the target or on stimuli that matched its color. In addition, we found that even when observers used the same number of clicks to find a target (2 or 3), the average distance was shorter when observers reported high-level subjective visibility. The findings are compatible with the partial awareness hypothesis, and the visual ensembles and summary statistics hypothesis, which hold that visual awareness is probabilistic. These results also support the visual short-term memory models where many items are stored but with a resolution or noise level that depends on the number of items in memory.