Summary
The effect on both detection and identification of placing a non-target character to the foveal or peripheral side of the position of a parafoveally presented target character was examined in two experiments. The experiments found more interference with both tasks when the nontarget was peripheral to the target position, but only when the target and nontarget were both darker or brighter than the background. If one character was darker than the background, and the other was brighter, the asymmetry appeared in neither task. In Experiment 2, performance in both tasks was poorer when the two characters had the same features, but this effect was independent of both nontarget position and target-nontarget contrast. While these results are inconsistent with a feature-mixing explanation of the asymmetry, contrast-specific lateral inhibition can account for the phenomena.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Chastain G (1981) Asymmetric identification of parafoveal stimulus pairs: Feature perturbations or failure in feature extraction? Can J Psychol 35:13–23
Chastain G (1982) Confusability and interference between members of parafoveal letter pairs. Percept Psychophys 32:576–580
Gummerman K (1972) A response-contingent measure of proportion correct. J Acoust Soc Am 52:1645–1647
Krumhansl CL (1977) Naming and locating simultaneously and sequentially presented letters. Percept Psychophys 22:293–302
Krumhansl CL, Thomas EAC (1977) Effect of level of confusability on reporting letters from briefly presented visual displays. Percept Psychophys 21:269–279
Robson JG (1975) Receptive fields. In: Carterette EC, Friedman MP (eds) Handbook of perception, vol. 5. Academic Press, New York
Santee JL, Egeth HE (1982) Independence versus interference in the perceptual processing of letters. Percept Psychophys 31:101–116
White MJ (1981) Feature-specific border effects in the discrimination of letter-like forms. Percept Psychophys 29:156–162
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Chastain, G. Task and contrast effects on performance with parafoval stimulus pairs. Psychol. Res 45, 147–156 (1983). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00308666
Received:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00308666