Partial blindness: Visual experience is not rich, but not sparse

Is our perceptual experience constrained by an information bottleneck (i.e., the limited capacity for cognitive access), and if so, how? To answer these questions, we investigated observers’ perceptual resolution for an individual face when they saw either a single face or multiple faces simultaneously. We characterized perceptual resolution by measuring how accurately observers detected the degradation of a face. In two experiments, we found that the resolution of perception decreased when seeing multiple faces compared to when seeing a single face, which mainly resulted from the neglect of degradation. Importantly, this degradation neglect was based on partial blindness rather than complete blindness to a face, indicating that perceptual experience is limited by an information bottleneck as a form of partial blindness to an individual item. Together, our findings suggest that perceptual experience at a glance might be sparser than retinal resolution or perceptual resolution measured under conditions where the target stimulus is the sole focus of attention; however, it might be richer than a small handful of items.