The role of regularity in redundancy masking

Abstract

Redundancy masking is a newly discovered limitation in visual perception where the central target of a stimulus in the periphery is lost from conscious perception and observers report seeing fewer elements than they are presented with. The aim of this study is to explore if we can regain access to that missing information by varying the length of lines of the stimulus. We created a variety of different stimuli that consist of three to five lines of varying length using ten different shapes. Our main hypothesis was that by varying the length of lines we would reduce redundancy masking. We created a visual task on a computer where observers indicated the number of lines perceived and then reported the length of each individual line. 21 participants took part in the experiment. To test our hypothesis, we measured if underestimations from presented number of lines occurred, depending on the number of lines and the shapes presented. We also compared the overall percentage of where redundancy masking happened to previous studies with lines of identical length. Additionally, we examined how each shape appears to observers and compared the different appearance matches to the stimulus shape. The results support our hypothesis that redundancy masking is reduced when the length of the lines differ compared to when the length of the lines is always identical. The variations in length seem to help people to understand how many lines there are but they still make mistakes in terms of ratio between the lines. This study underlines that the peripheral vision is not as accurate as we might think.