Elsevier

Vision Research

Volume 45, Issue 11, May 2005, Pages 1459-1469
Vision Research

The time course of visual processing: Backward masking and natural scene categorisation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2005.01.004Get rights and content
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Abstract

Human observers are very good at deciding whether briefly flashed novel images contain an animal and previous work has shown that the underlying visual processing can be performed in under 150 ms. Here we used a masking paradigm to determine how information accumulates over time during such high-level categorisation tasks. As the delay between test image and mask is increased, both behavioural accuracy and differential ERP amplitude rapidly increase to reach asymptotic levels around 40–60 ms. Such results imply that processing at each stage in the visual system is remarkably rapid, with information accumulating almost continuously following the onset of activation.

Keywords

Natural images
Backward masking
Early processing
Information integration
Event-related potentials (ERP)

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