Competition for consciousness among visual events: the psychophysics of reentrant visual processes.
Advances in neuroscience implicate reentrant signaling as the predominant form of communication between brain areas. This principle was used in a series of masking experiments that defy explanation by feed-forward theories. The masking occurs when a brief display of target plus mask is continued with the mask alone. Two masking processes were found: an early process affected by physical factors such as adapting luminance and a later process affected by attentional factors such as set size. This later process is called masking by object substitution, because it occurs whenever there is a mismatch between the reentrant visual representation and the ongoing lower level activity. Iterative reentrant processing was formalized in a computational model that provides an excellent fit to the data. The model provides a more comprehensive account of all forms of visual masking than do the long-held feed-forward views based on inhibitory contour interactions.
Di Lollo
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Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. vince.dilollo@ubc.ca
Enns
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Rensink
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D000328:Adult; D003243:Consciousness; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008606:Mental Processes; D008960:Models, Psychological; D009474:Neurons; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception