Goro Maehara | PubMed Health

PubMed2004

Effects of background color on detecting spot stimuli in the upper and lower visual fields.

Participants were required to detect spot stimuli briefly presented to the upper, central, or lower visual fields. The stimuli were presented either on a green or a red background. Results showed that reaction time (RT) was shorter for the lower visual field (LVF) compared to the upper visual field (UVF). Furthermore, this LVF advantage was significantly reduced in the red background condition compared to the green one. A red light is known to suppress activity of the magno-dominated stream. Therefore, the LVF advantage in RT can be explained as resulting from the biased representation of the magno-dominated stream in the LVF.

Adult↗

PubMed2003

Perceptual learning in visual backward pattern masking.

The present study examined the practice effect of backward pattern masking in the context of recent researches on perceptual learning. On the discrimination task, thresholds decreased substantially with practice. In addition, the practice effect was specific to the mask pattern. In contrast, it cannot reasonably be assumed that the practice effect was specific to the eye and the retinal position. These findings suggest that practice diminished the interruption of processing in capacity-limited processing. In addition, the specificity of the practice effect to the mask pattern suggests that participants learned to filter out the specific type of mask from capacity-limited processing. On the detection task, thresholds decreased with practice. But the improvement was smaller on the detection task than on the discrimination task. It may be assumed that the practice effect on the detection task does not involve a decrease in the effect of the interruption in capacity-limited processing.

Discrimination Learning↗