Abstract

It has not been clarified if attention influences perception of targets in visual masking. Three forms of common masks were thus chosen in the present study and presented with character targets in three temporal sequences. In order to pinpoint the level of processing where masking arises, character targets were varied in depth of processing from random arrangements of strokes up to real Chinese characters. The attentional influence was examined under perceptual discrimination and lexical decision tasks, respectively. The results revealed significant interactions among four factors. Identification of character targets in each form of mask sequence varied with task demand, with greater suppression in the perceptual discrimination task. These findings suggested that attentional demand can bias processing in favor of task-related information in visual masking. Variations in masking effects may be contributed by both attentional demand and spatio-temporal interaction.