Visual information can be processed at pre-conscious as well as conscious levels. Understanding the factors that determine whether or not a stimulus reaches phenomenal awareness and the fate of stimulus information that remains at preconscious levels, poses major challenges to current research in visual cognition and neuroscience. First published in 1984, Visual Masking was a classic text in the field of cognitive psychology. In the years since, considerable advances that have been made in the cognitive neurosciences have been accompanied by a growing interest in the topic of consciousness. The current, 2nd edition takes into account these new findings and research interests. Incorporating much new, and deleting some old materials, this book focuses on visual masking as a technique of making ‘time slices’ on a millisecond scale through conscious and pre-conscious vision. The result is a detailed description of the temporal dynamics that comprise the microgenesis of visual object perception from the time a stimulus is presented on the retinae to the time, several hundreds of milliseconds later, of its registration at pre-conscious, behavioural, and at conscious, perceptual levels. The book takes a highly integrative approach, relating visual masking within a wide compass, not only to the study of conscious perception, but also to related spatio-temporal phenomena of vision such as motion perception, attention, and to a variety of visual deficits.

Feedforward and feedback processes in vision