The attentional dynamics of masked detection

A dichoptic masking procedure was used to test whether the mask-dependent cuing effects found in luminance detection by P. L. Smith (2000a) were due to integration masking or interruption masking. Attentional cuing enhanced detection sensitivity (d') when stimuli were backwardly masked with either dichoptic or monoptic masks, whereas no cuing effect was found with unmasked stimuli, implying the mask dependencies were due to interruption of stimulus processing in visual cortex by the mask. The effect is predicted by a gated diffusion process model in which masks interrupt stimulus processing and attention controls the flow of information to a sequential-sampling decision mechanism. The model correctly predicts different patterns of performance for detection and discrimination and cuing effects in simple reaction time.