An investigation into the representations involved in visual masking.

ABSTRACT

Two experiments are reported in which the nature of the representations involved in visual masking with spatially overlapping stimuli is investigated. Recent work is described which was consistent with the proposal of Breitmeyer and Ganz (1976) that masking phenomena can be understood in terms of interactions between spatial-frequency-tuned channels. In the first experiment targets which had been filtered to contain only high or low spatial frequencies were masked by high or low frequency masks. The results were more consistent with a model of masking in which higher-order representations, possibly derived from spatial-frequency information, were involved. A second experiment was carried out to test this conjecture which involved investigating the interaction between the effects of learning and the type of information used in target identification. The results provided further support for the model.