Visual persistence at both onset and offset of stimulation

Subjects identified dot bigrams appearing within or disappearing from random dot patterns. Each letter could be split into two predefined parts; the cues concerning the complete letter were minimized in each half. Identification performance was investigated as the interval between the appearance or disappearance of bigram halves was varied in the range 0 to 300 msec. The results indicate that the durations of persistence of information concerning stimulus onset and offset are at least 180 and 120 msec, respectively.