Article
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Effects of Exogenous and Endogenous Attention on Metacontrast Masking
Version 1
: Received: 13 June 2018 / Approved: 13 June 2018 / Online: 13 June 2018 (11:06:02 CEST)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Agaoglu, S.; Breitmeyer, B.; Ogmen, H. Effects of Exogenous and Endogenous Attention on Metacontrast Masking. Vision 2018, 2, 39. Agaoglu, S.; Breitmeyer, B.; Ogmen, H. Effects of Exogenous and Endogenous Attention on Metacontrast Masking. Vision 2018, 2, 39.
Abstract
To efficiently use its finite resources, the visual system selects for further processing only a subset of the rich sensory information. Visual masking and spatial attention control the information transfer from visual sensory-memory to visual short-term memory. There is still a debate whether these two processes operate independently or interact, with empirical evidence supporting both arguments. However, recent studies pointed out that earlier studies showing significant interactions between common-onset masking and attention suffered from ceiling and/or floor effects. Our review of previous studies reporting metacontrast-attention interactions revealed similar artifacts. Therefore, we investigated metacontrast-attention interactions by using an experimental paradigm in which ceiling/floor effects were avoided. We also examined whether metacontrast masking is differently influenced by endogenous and exogenous attention. We analyzed mean absolute-magnitude of response-errors and their statistical distribution. Our results support the hypothesis that metacontrast and endogenous/exogenous attention are largely independent with negligible likelihood for interactions. Moreover, statistical modeling of the distribution of response-errors suggests weak interactions modulating the probability of “guessing” behavior for some observers in both types of attention. Nevertheless, our data suggest that any joint effect of attention and metacontrast can be adequately explained by their independent and additive contributions.
Keywords
metacontrast; attention; exogenous attention; endogenous attention; visual masking; masking attention interactions
Subject
Social Sciences, Cognitive Science
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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