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Abstract

Peripheral vision is limited due to several factors, such as visual resolution, crowding, and attention. When attention is not directed towards a stimulus, detection, discrimination, and identification are often compromised. Recent studies have found a new phenomenon that strongly limits peripheral vision, “redundancy masking”. In redundancy masking, the number of perceived items in repeating patterns is reduced. For example, when presenting three lines in the peripheral visual field and asking participants to report the number of lines, often only two lines are reported. Here, we investigated what role attention plays in redundancy masking. If redundancy masking was due to limited attention to the target, it should be stronger when less attention is allocated to the target, and absent when attention is maximally focused on the target. Participants were presented with line arrays and reported the number of lines in three cueing conditions (i.e., single cue, double cue, and no cue). Redundancy masking was observed in all cueing conditions, with observers reporting fewer lines than presented in the single, double, and no cue conditions. These results suggest that redundancy masking is not due to limited attention. The number of lines reported was closer to the correct number of lines in the single compared to the double and the no cue conditions, suggesting that reduced attention additionally compromised stimulus discrimination, and replicating typical effects of diminished attention. Taken together, our results suggest that the extent of attention to peripherally presented stimuli modulates discrimination performance, but does not account for redundancy masking.

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Acknowledgements

Parts of this work were presented at the European Conference on Visual Perception 2019 in Leuven, Belgium. This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (PP00P1_163723 to Bilge Sayim).

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F.Z.Y.K., D.R.C., and B.S. designed the study and prepared the manuscript. F.Z.Y.K. collected and analyzed the data and prepared the figures. All authors interpreted the data, F.Z.Y.K. and B.S. wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Fazilet Zeynep Yildirim-Keles.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Open Practices Statement

The datasets generated during the study are available on the Open Science Framework database (https://osf.io/8zagw/). The experiments were not preregistered.

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Appendix

Appendix

Figs. 4 and 5

Fig. 4
figure 4

The magnitude of RM as a function of cueing condition, number of lines, and location. Mean deviation scores for each number of lines, location, and cueing condition are shown in polar coordinates. The center of each polar plot (-0.3) indicates strong RM (negative deviation scores) and the most eccentric polar coordinate (0) indicates an absence of RM (correct response). Error bars show ±SEM

Fig. 5
figure 5

Accuracy as a function of number of lines, location, and cueing condition. The average proportion correct for each number of lines, location, and cueing condition are shown in polar coordinates. Increasing eccentricity on the polar plot indicates increasing proportion correct values. Accuracy was higher in the single cue condition compared to the no cue and double cue conditions. Error bars show ±SEM

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Yildirim-Keles, F.Z., Coates, D.R. & Sayim, B. Attention in redundancy masking. Atten Percept Psychophys (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-024-02885-8

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