To efficiently use its finite resources, the visual system selects for further processing only a subset of the rich sensory information. Visual masking and spatial attention control the information transfer from visual sensory-memory to visual short-term memory. There is still a debate whether these two processes operate independently or interact, with empirical evidence supporting both arguments. However, recent studies pointed out that earlier studies showing significant interactions between common-onset masking and attention suffered from ceiling and/or floor effects. Our review of previous studies reporting metacontrast-attention interactions revealed similar artifacts. Therefore, we investigated metacontrast-attention interactions by using an experimental paradigm, in which ceiling/floor effects were avoided. We also examined whether metacontrast masking is differently influenced by endogenous and exogenous attention. We analyzed mean absolute-magnitude of response-errors and their statistical distribution. When targets are masked, our results support the hypothesis that manipulations of the levels of metacontrast and of endogenous/exogenous attention have largely independent effects. Moreover, statistical modeling of the distribution of response-errors suggests weak interactions modulating the probability of "guessing" behavior for some observers in both types of attention. Nevertheless, our data suggest that any joint effect of attention and metacontrast can be adequately explained by their independent and additive contributions.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/vision2040039 | DOI Listing |
Conscious Cogn
October 2024
Department of Neuroscience, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkiye; Aysel Sabuncu Brain Research Center, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkiye; Neuroscience and Neurotechnology Center of Excellence (NÖROM), Faculty of Medicine, Gazi University, Ankara, Turkiye. Electronic address:
Cortex
September 2024
Developmental and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, General Psychology Department, University of Padova, Italy. Electronic address:
Previous literature showed how left spatial neglect arises from an asymmetrical distribution of spatial attention. However, it was also suggested that left spatial neglect might be partially caused or at least worsened by non-spatial attention disorders of the right-lateralized stimulus-driven attentional fronto-parietal network. Here, we psychophysically tested the efficiency of temporal attentional engagement of foveal perception through meta-contrast (Experiment 1) and "attentional" masking (Experiment 2) tasks in patients with right-hemisphere stroke with left neglect (N+), without left neglect (N-) and matched healthy controls (C).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Vis
April 2024
Laboratory of Psychophysics, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland.
Conscious perception is preceded by long periods of unconscious processing. These periods are crucial for analyzing temporal information and for solving the many ill-posed problems of vision. An important question is what starts and ends these windows and how they may be interrupted.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Gen
March 2023
Faculty of Psychology.
To investigate whether language rules the visual features that can be discriminated (a radical assumption of linguistic relativity), we examined crosslinguistic differences between native Korean and German speakers during liminal perception of a target disk that was difficult to perceive because its visibility suffered from masking by a ring that followed and enclosed the target disk (metacontrast-masking). Target-mask fit varied, with half of the masks tightly and the other half loosely encircling the targets. In Korean, such tight versus loose spatial relations are semantically distinguished and thus highly practiced, whereas in German, they are collapsed within a single semantic category, thus are not distinguished by language.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPerception
August 2022
234487University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
According to the central-peripheral dichotomy (CPD), feedback from higher to lower cortical areas along the visual pathway to aid recognition is weaker in the more peripheral visual field. Metacontrast masking is predominantly a reduced visibility of a brief target by a brief and spatially adjacent mask when the mask succeeds rather than precedes or coincides with the target. If this masking works mainly by interfering with the feedback mechanisms for target recognition, then, by the CPD, this masking should be weaker at more peripheral visual locations.
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