Spatial aspects of object formation revealed by a new illusion, shine-through

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.