Gestalt grouping and common onset masking

A four-dot mask that surrounds and is presented simultaneously with a briefly presented target will reduce a person’s ability to identity that target if the mask persists beyond target offset and attention is divided (Enns & Di Lollo, 1997, 2000).This masking effect, referred to as common onset masking, reflectsreentrant processing in the visual systemand can best be explained with a theory of object substitution (Di Lollo, Enns, & Rensink, 2000).In the present experiments, we investigatedwhether Gestalt grouping variables would influence the strength of common onset masking.The results indicated that (1) masking was impervious to grouping by form, similarity of color, position, luminance polarity, and common region and (2) masking increased with the number of elements in the masking display.

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