In continuous flash suppression (CFS), an image presented to one eye is suppressed from awareness by a dynamic image masker presented to the other eye. Previous studies report that face stimuli break out of CFS more readily when they are oriented upright and contain ecologically relevant information such as facial expressions or direct eye gaze, potentially implicating face processing in the mechanisms of interocular competition. It is unknown, however, whether face content helps to drive interocular suppression when incorporated into the dynamic masker itself, either by engaging higher-level visual mechanisms that underlie face detection or due to lower-level image features that the faces happen to contain. To investigate this, we devised a dynamic mask composed of upright faces and tested how well it suppressed detection of face or grating targets presented to the other eye. Relative contributions of higher-level and lower-level features were compared by manipulating the image properties of the mask. Results show that the dynamic face mask is strikingly effective at suppressing sensory input presented to the opposing eye, but its effectiveness is largely attributable to image texture, which can be quantified in terms of image entropy and edge density. This is because strong suppression was still observed following phase-scrambling or spatial inversion of the face elements, and while a target-selective effect was observed for the face mask, inverting the face elements to interfere with configural processing did not significantly diminish this effect. Thus, visual properties of faces, such as their image entropy and complex phase structure, predominate in driving interocular suppression rather than face detection per se.

在连续闪光抑制（CFS）中，呈现给一只眼睛的图像被呈现给另一只眼睛的动态图像蒙版抑制了感知。以前的研究报告说，当面部刺激直立放置并包含与生态相关的信息（例如面部表情或直接的目光）时，面部刺激会更容易脱离CFS，这可能将面部处理牵涉到眼内竞争的机制中。但是，将面部内容包含在动态遮罩自身中时，是否通过参与构成面部检测基础的高级视觉机制，或者由于面部恰好包含的较低级图像特征，面部内容是否有助于推动眼内抑制。为了对此进行调查，我们设计了一个由直立脸部组成的动态遮罩，并测试了该遮罩在多大程度上抑制了呈现给另一只眼睛的脸部或光栅目标的检测。通过操纵遮罩的图像属性，比较了较高级别和较低级别功能的相对贡献。结果表明，动态面罩在抑制呈现给对侧眼睛的感觉输入方面具有惊人的效果，但其效果在很大程度上归因于图像纹理，可以从图像熵和边缘密度方面对其进行量化。这是因为在对面部元素进行相位加扰或空间反转之后仍观察到强烈的抑制，并且尽管观察到了面罩的目标选择效果，但是反转面部元素以干扰配置处理并没有显着减小这种效果。从而，