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Paper   IPM / Cognitive Sciences / 10763
School of Cognitive Sciences
  Title:   Attention during adaptation weakens negative afterimages of perceptually colour-spread surfaces
  Author(s):  Armin Lak
  Status:   Published
  Journal: Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology
  No.:  2
  Vol.:  62
  Year:  2008
  Pages:   101-109
  Supported by:  IPM
  Abstract:
The visual system can complete coloured surfaces from stimulus fragments, inducing the subjective perception of a colour-spread figure. Negative afterimages of these induced colours were first reported by S. Shimojo, Y. Kamitani, and S. Nishida (2001). Two experiments were conducted to examine the effect of attention on the duration of these afterimages. The results showed that shifting attention to the colour-spread figure during the adaptation phase weakened the subsequent afterimage. On the basis of previous findings that the duration of these afterimages is correlated with the strength of perceptual filling-in (grouping) among local inducers during the adaptation phase, it is proposed that attention weakens perceptual filling-in during the adaptation phase and thereby prevents the stimulus from being segmented into an illusory figure.

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