Visual perception in a snapshot
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Date
2006-04-14Author
Elliott, Mark
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Recommended Citation
Bachmann, T., Elliott, M., Herzog, M., & Vorberg, D. (2007). Visual perception in a snapshot. Psychological Research, 71(6), 615-617.
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Abstract
To study visual perception in its sub-second scale of
time continues to be timely: we have more unsolved
puzzles than bits of a firm undisputable knowledge
about how our perceptions are created in a snapshot of
time. Even though microgenesis of mental states and
reactions over an observable, actual progression of time
intervals has been often studied by the proponents of the
microgenetic approach within educational psychology
and language development studies, the stage-by-stage
development of visual percepts within about 0.1¿0.3 s
has remained somewhat disconnected from the concept
of microgenesis when psychophysics and experimental
cognitive psychology are concerned. While de facto
microgenetic research has been popular recently (e.g.
O¨
g¿men & Breitmeyer, 2006), (and this is regardless of
the frequent disguising of this concept by the terms like
formation and information-processing), we still do not
know what precisely is visual masking, how masking and
attention interact, what types of mental operations can
be successfully carried out without explicit, conscious
perception and what cannot (and what are the interdependencies
between them). There is no certainty about
what regularities characterise the fine-grain timing of the
emergence of explicit perceptions and what are the key
factors in analysing the timing of microgenesis; what is
the relative role of feedforward and re-entrant processes
in conscious vision. And of course, are there any good
psychophysiological, objectivised signatures that can be
meaningfully and reliably used to analyse such fast and
largely hidden processes?