When a vernier stimulus is presented for a short time and followed by a gra
ting comprising five straight lines, the vernier remains invisible but may
bequeath its offset to the grating (feature inheritance). For more than sev
en grating elements, the vernier is rendered visible as a shine-through ele
ment. However, shine-through depends strongly on the spatio-temporal layout
of the grating. Here, we show that spatially inhomogeneous gratings dimini
sh shine-through and vernier discrimination. Even subtle deviations, in the
range of a few minutes of arc, matter. However, longer presentation times
of the vernier regenerate shine-through. Feature inheritance and shine-thro
ugh may become a useful tool in investigating such different topics as time
course of information processing, feature binding, attention, and masking.
(C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.