Perceptual interference decays over short unfilled intervals

The perceptual interference effect refers to the fact that object identific ation is directly related to the amount of information available at initial exposure. The present article investigated whether perceptual interference would dissipate when a short, unfilled interval was introduced between exp osures to a degraded object. Across three experiments using both musical an d pictorial stimuli, identification performance increased directly with the length of the unfilled interval. Consequently, significant perceptual inte rference was obtained only when the interval between exposures was relative ly short (<500 msec for melodies; <300 msec for pictures). These results ar e consistent with explanations that attribute perceptual interference to in creased perceptual noise created by exposures to highly degraded objects. T he data also suggest that perceptual interference is mediated by systems th at are not consciously controlled by the subject and that perceptual interf erence in the visual domain decays more rapidly than perceptual interferenc e in the auditory domain.