Physiology Commons^™

An Unattended Mask Makes An Attended Target Disappear, Arielle A. Veenemans, Patrick Cavanagh

Dartmouth Scholarship

In pattern masking, the target and mask are presented at the same location and follow one another very closely in time. When the observer attends to the target, he or she must also attend to the mask, as the switching time for attention is quite slow. In a series of experiments, we present mask–target–mask sequences staggered in time and location (Cavanagh, Holcombe, & Chou, 2008) that allow participants to attentively track the target location without attending to the masks. The results show that the strength of masking is on average unaffected by the removal of attention from the masks. Moreover, …