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Masking unveils pre-amodal completion representation in visual search

Nature volume 410, pages 369–372 (2001)Cite this article

Abstract

When one object is partly occluded by another, its occluded parts are perceptually ‘filled in’, that is, the occluded object appears to continue behind its occluder. This process is known as amodal completion1. The completion of a partially occluded object takes about 200 ms (ref. 2), and pre-completion information (that is, information from before amodal completion has occurred) exists in the visual system for that duration2,3. It has been suggested, however, that observers cannot make use of this information, even when it is beneficial to do so: visual search for a target that appears to be partly occluded, for example, is slower than for a target that does not undergo occlusion, despite both targets being physically identical4,5,6. Here we show that visual search does have access to pre-completion representations, but only for a limited time that depends on the size of the occluded region.

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Figure 1: Visual search task.
Figure 2: Participants' performance as a function of SOA, target type (adjacent or separate), and number of items in the display.
Figure 3: Participants' performance as a function of target type (adjacent or separate) and number of items in the display.
Figure 4: Participants' performance as a function of target type (adjacent or separate) and number of items in the display.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health. We are grateful to J. Enns and J. Wolfe (who suggested the response-time control experiment) for their comments on an earlier draft.

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  1. Department of Psychology, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 21218, Maryland, USA

    Robert Rauschenberger & Steven Yantis

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  1. Robert Rauschenberger
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Correspondence to Robert Rauschenberger.

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Rauschenberger, R., Yantis, S. Masking unveils pre-amodal completion representation in visual search. Nature 410, 369–372 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35066577

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