Abstract
Subjects judged whether two adjacent letters were identical or different under difficult conditions (brief, parafoveal, laterally masked letter pairs). Consistent with the noisy-operator theory, the increase in internal noise produced more spurious mismatches than matches and thus prompted greater rechecking of different pairs, because a large, nearly 70-msec speed advantage for same pairs was found, along with many false-different responses. Rechecking of spurious mismatches faltered (the fast-same effect remained the same or decreased, whereas false-different errors abounded), when particular letter pairs were presented mirror-reversed (Experiment 1) or had an outer (more peripheral) lateral mask (Experiment 2). Contrary to Wolford’s feature-perturbation model, backward masking greatly exceeded forward masking, especially with an outer mask.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Banks, W. P., Bachrach, K. M., & Larson, D. W. (1977). The asymmetry of lateral interference in visual letter identification. Perception & Psychophysics, 22, 232–240.
Banks, W. P., Larson, D. W., & Prinzmetal, W. (1979). Asymmetry of visual interference. Perception & Psychophysics, 25, 447–456.
Chastain, G. (1982). Masking and the identification of characters presented simultaneously and sequentially to the parafovea. Psychological Research, 44, 135–145.
Egeth, H., & Blecker, D. (1971). Differential effects of familiarity on judgments of sameness and difference. Perception & Psychophysics, 9, 321–326.
Eriksen, C. W., O’Hara, W. P., & Eriksen, B. (1982). Response competition effects in same-different judgments. Perception & Psychophysics, 32, 261–270.
Kahneman, D. (1968). Method, findings, and theory in studies of backward masking. Psychological Bulletin, 70, 404–425.
Krueger, L. E. (1978). A theory of perceptual matching. Psychological Review, 85, 278–304.
Krueger, L. E. (1985). Effect of intermixed foveal and parafoveal presentation on same-different judgments: Evidence for a criterion-inertia model. Perception & Psychophysics, 37, 266–271.
Krumhansl, C. L. (1977). Naming and locating simultaneously and sequentially presented letters. Perception & Psychophysics, 22, 293–302.
Mackworth, N. H. (1965). Visual noise causes tunnel vision. Psychonomic Science, 3, 67–68.
Schissler, D., & Barata, M. (1972). Evidence for an addition to the reading scan hypothesis. Perception & Psychophysics, 12, 221–223.
Shepard, R. N., & Metzler, J. (1971). Mental rotation of three-dimensional objects. Science, 171, 701–703.
White, M. J. (1976). Order of processing in visual perception. Canadian Journal of Psychology, 30, 140–156.
Wolford, G. (1975). Perturbation model for letter identification. Psychological Review, 82, 184–199.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Krueger, L.E., Gott, R.E. Effect of lateral masking and letter reversal on same-different judgments. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 23, 185–188 (1985). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03329821
Received:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03329821