Metacontrast masking and attention

Metacontrast masking is generally considered an effect of preattentive proc esses operative in early vision. Because of the growing evidence of the rol e of attention in other phenomena previously considered low level and preat tentive, its possible role in masking was explored in three experiments in which meaningful target stimuli known to capture attention (one's own name or a happy-face icon) were compared with control stimuli identical in spati al frequency and luminance. Not only were these salient stimuli significant ly more resistant to masking than the control stimuli, but when one of the meaningful stimuli served as a mask, its strength was increased relative to a less meaningful variant, documenting the strong influence of attention o n masking.