Context-produced increase in visibility

Summary It has not been clearly shown that context (e. g., three lines of a square) increases the visibility of a feature (e. g., the fourth line of the same square). To investigate this possibility, four sets of context+feature, context, feature, and BLANK (empty field) stimuli were used. For three out of the four sets, the context+feature stimulus was less likely to be falsely identified as the context and BLANK stimuli (i. e., the stimuli without the feature) than was the feature stimulus. For the same three sets, discriminating between the context+feature and context stimuli produced fewer false identifications (FIs) than discriminating between the feature and BLANK stimuli. The conclusion: the context components of context+feature stimuli increased the visibility of the feature components of the same stimuli.