Events

Visual backward masking refers to the phenomenon in which a trailing mask stimulus interferes with the visibility of a preceding target stimulus. Most theoretical models have focused on explaining the mechanisms that lead to masking — that is, to the invisibility of the target. Here, we present a complementary approach in which we seek to identify the processes and mechanisms that contribute to target visibility. Our results provide evidence ...

Progress in vision research has been slower downstream than upstream of primary visual cortex (V1). Traditional frameworks have largely overlooked a central constraint: only a tiny fraction of retinal input is recognized. Thus, to a first approximation, vision is better formulated as looking and seeing through a bottleneck. Looking, mainly by the peripheral visual field, selects visual information to enter this bottleneck, largely via gaze s ...

Keeping track of multiple moving objects in a cluttered, dynamic environment is a fundamental challenge for visual attention. A key question is what determines the limits of this ability, and whether those limits are attentional in nature. To address this, I will draw on the steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) technique -- an EEG-based frequency-tagging method that allows the strength of attentional enhancement to be measured contin ...

One of the most popular approaches to unconscious cognition is the technique of “post-hoc selection”: Priming effects and visibility ratings are measured in multitasks on the same trial, and only trials with lowest visibility ratings are selected for analysis of (presumably unconscious) priming effects. In the past, the technique has been criticized for creating statistical artifacts and capitalizing on chance. In our new paper (Schmidt et a ...