Abstract
The first two experiments show that recognition of target letters presented briefly in the fovea, exactly at the fixation point, is degraded by masking characters placed beside them and, further, that the amount of degradation is reduced when the masking characters are clustered into a Gestalt group with noise characters that are added to the array. Experiment 3 presents targets in the periphery at well-specified locations for essentially continuous viewing and also shows both lateral masking and the release of masking by grouping of noise characters. These results demonstrate that neither lateral masking nor the release of masking by grouping of noise can be entirely accounted for by uncertainty of location of the target. Gestalt grouping can influence the ways in which an array is searched, but, in addition, it affects the resolving power of the visual system. Implications for theories of lateral masking, feature perturbation, and Gestalt grouping effects are discussed.
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This research was supported by NIMH Grant MH 33279. The authors thank William K. Estes, William Prinzmetal, and George Wolford for their comments and advice on this research. The final version of this article was completed while the first author was on leave at the Cognitive Science Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego, under the sponsorship of Donald H. Norman.
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Banks, W.P., White, H. Lateral interference and perceptual grouping in visual detection. Perception & Psychophysics 36, 285–295 (1984). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03206370
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03206370