INTERACTION BETWEEN SUB-NYQUIST AND SUPRA-NYQUIST SPATIAL-FREQUENCIESIN PERIPHERAL-VISION

In peripheral vision, high-frequency gratings beyond the Nyquist limit are visible as aliased patterns but, as shown previously, their visib ility can be masked by superimposed sub-Nyquist gratings, Is the conve rse also true? Can supra-Nyquist gratings affect the detectability of sub-Nyquist gratings? In this study, we investigated the masking effec t of high contrast, supra-Nyquist components of a compound grating on the contrast detection of sub-Nyquist components by employing a tempor al three-alternative, forced-choice (3AFC) masking paradigm, We found that high-frequency, aliased gratings with contrast just 2 or 3 times above threshold can have a powerful masking effect on low-frequency, r esolved gratings in peripheral vision, This result was surprising beca use prior results from sub-Nyquist masking studies in the fovea and th e periphery have indicated that masking occurs only when the mask cont rast is at least 5 times greater than threshold, Strong masking by sup ra-Nyquist gratings that are only just visible may be accounted for by an irregular sampling model in which the alias of the mask is distrib uted over a band of frequencies in the sub-Nyquist range, Furthermore, if undersampling is the explanation for the results of this study, th en masking must occur after spatial sampling, (C) 1997 Elsevier Scienc e Ltd.