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Attend to it now or lose it forever: Selective attention, metacontrast masking, and object substitution

Perception & Psychophysics volume 64, pages 1028–1038 (2002)Cite this article

Abstract

Metacontrast masking occurs when the visibility of a brief target stimulus is decreased by the subsequent appearance of another nearby visual stimulus. Early explanations of the phenomenon involved low-level mechanisms, but subsequent studies have suggested a role for selective attention. The results of three experiments presented here extend previous findings to the metacontrast paradigm. It is shown that the strength of metacontrast masking increases with the number of distractor items in a display, decreases when the target location is validly but not invalidly precued, and is eliminated when search for the target is efficient (pop-out search) but not when search is inefficient (serial search). A connection between metacontrast masking and object substitution masking is considered.

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Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, 2136 West Mall, V6T 1Z4, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Matthew S. Tata

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  1. Matthew S. Tata
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Correspondence to Matthew S. Tata.

Additional information

This work was done in partial fulfillment of the MSc degree to the author under the supervision of D. Giaschi. Funding was provided by NSERC Grant OGPO194526 to D. Giaschi and NSERC Grant OGP0006592 to V. Di Lollo.

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Tata, M.S. Attend to it now or lose it forever: Selective attention, metacontrast masking, and object substitution. Perception & Psychophysics 64, 1028–1038 (2002). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194754

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194754

Keywords

  • Stimulus Onset Asynchrony
  • Selective Attention
  • Attentional Blink
  • Inattentional Blindness
  • Reflexive Orienting