title: What you see is what you get: functional equivalence of a perceptually filled-in surface and a physically presented stimulus.
abstract: A perceptually filled-in surface, such as occurs during sustained attention to a peripheral stimulus (Troxler fading), can be functionally equivalent to a physically presented stimulus. Observers failed to detect probes that were presented in the location of a filled-in surface that had the same surface attributes as the probes; this was true even though, physically, the probes contrasted with the background. Probe stimuli with surface characteristics different from those of the filled-in surface were detected more often, though not quite as often as when there was no filled-in surface. Together, these findings support the idea that there are two components in perceptual filling: a neural filling-in component and a sustained-attention component, which actively suppresses perceptual processing at the filled-in location. More broadly, they illustrate the interplay of basic visual mechanisms in the creation and representation of visual surfaces and in the coding and detection of changes to these surfaces.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 603 East Daniel St., Champaign, IL 61820, USA. alleras@uiuc.edu
authors.forename: Alejandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Lleras
authors.forename: Cathleen M
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Moore
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D003118:Color Perception; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005364:Field Dependence-Independence; D006801:Humans; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011601:Psychophysics; D014794:Visual Fields