S. Yantis et J. Jonides, ATTENTIONAL CAPTURE BY ABRUPT ONSETS - NEW PERCEPTUAL OBJECTS OR VISUAL MASKING, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance, 22(6), 1996, pp. 1505-1513
The authors have shown that an object appearing abruptly in a previous
ly blank location is efficiently detected in visual search when it is
embedded in an array of objects without abrupt onset (termed no-onset
stimuli). In these experiments, no-onset stimuli appeared well before
the onset stimulus but were camouflaged by additional line segments re
ndering the stimuli unidentifiable. B. S. Gibson (1996) claims that th
e availability of the no-onset stimuli was delayed relative to that of
the abrupt onset stimulus because of forward masking. The authors sho
w that forward masking is unlikely to be a significant factor in their
experiments, and 3 new experiments are reported that undermine Gibson
's masking account. Observed differences in the efficiency with which
onset and no-onset stimuli are processed in visual search are due to a
ttentional capture by new perceptual objects and to a relatively slugg
ish process of updating existing object representations.