Abstract
The perception of a target depends on other stimuli surrounding it in time and space. This contextual modulation is ubiquitous in visual perception, and is usually quantified by measuring performance on sets of highly similar stimuli. Implicit or explicit comparisons among the stimuli may, however, inadvertently bias responses and conceal strong variability of target appearance. Here, we investigated the influence of contextual stimuli on the perception of a repeating pattern (a line triplet), presented in the visual periphery. In the neutral condition, the triplet was presented a single time to capture its minimally biased perception. In the similar and dissimilar conditions, it was presented within stimulus sets composed of lines similar to the triplet, and distinct shapes, respectively. The majority of observers reported perceiving a line pair in the neutral and dissimilar conditions, revealing ‘redundancy masking’, the reduction of the perceived number of repeating items. In the similar condition, by contrast, the number of lines was overestimated. Our results show that the similar context did not reveal redundancy masking which was only observed in the neutral and dissimilar context. We suggest that the influence of contextual stimuli has inadvertently concealed this crucial aspect of peripheral appearance.
Highlights
The perception of a target depends on other stimuli surrounding it in time and space
In crowding, flanking items deteriorate performance on a target that is identified in isolation[10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19]. Contextual influences such as set size[2,3] and stimulus range[2,3,4,20,21] have been shown to modulate target processing, with processing speed of targets depending on the size and the familiarity of the stimulus set in which the targets were embedded[22,23]
As in the neutral condition, we found strong redundancy masking for the line triplet (M = 2.31)
Summary
The perception of a target depends on other stimuli surrounding it in time and space. The aim was to minimize systematic effects of contextual stimuli on target perception by preventing comparisons with any other stimuli: In a single trial paradigm, a large number of observers were presented with the line triplet once, and asked to freely report what they perceived. Until response + 440 ms result shows how the line triplet was perceived when not influenced by contextual stimuli, revealing minimally biased (or unbiased) perception.
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