Visual Masking Time Slices through Conscious and Unconscious Vision

Our visual system can process information at both conscious and unconscious levels. Understanding the factors that control whether a stimulus reaches our awareness, and the fate of those stimuli that remain at an unconscious level, are the major challenges of brain science in the newmillennium. Since its publication in 1984, Visual Masking has established itself as a classic text in the field of cognitive psychology. In the years since, there have been considerable advances in the cognitive neurosciences, and a growth of interest in the topic of consciousness, and the time isripe for a new edition of this text. Where most current approaches to the study of visual consciousness adopt a 'steady-state' view, the approach presented in this book explores its dynamic properties. This new edition uses the technique of visual masking to explore temporal aspects of conscious and unconscious processes down to aresolution in the millisecond range. The 'time slices' through conscious and unconscious vision revealed by the visual masking technique can shed light on both normal and abnormal operations in the brain. The main focus of this book is on the microgenesis of visual form and pattern perception -microgenesis referring to the processes occurring in the visual system from the time of stimulus presentation on the retinae to the time, a few hundred milliseconds later, of its registration at conscious or unconscious perceptual and behavioural levels. The book takes a highly integrative approachby presenting microgenesis within a broad context encompassing visuo-temporal phenomena, attention, and consciousness.

Bruno Breitmeyer received his B. A. in mathematics from the University of Illinois-Urbana in 1968 and his Ph. D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1972. He joined the faculty of the University of Houston in 1972 as an assistant professor. From 1973-1974 he was a research fellow in visual perception at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey. From 1976-1977 and in the summer of 1987 he was an Alexander von Humboldt research fellow at the Department of Neurophysiology, Neurological Clinic, Freiburg University, Germany. Over the span of three decades his research interests have focused on spatiotemporal aspects of visual cognition, in particular on visual masking and the microgenesis of visual perception. Acknowledged as a leading expert in the field of visual masking, his work has received the Citation Classic award from the Institute of Scientific Information. Haluk Ogmen received B.Sc.A. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Universite Laval, Quebec, Canada in 1983 and 1988, respectively. He joined the University of Houston in 1988 as an assistant professor. He spent the 1995-1996 academic year at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, CA as a visiting scientist. In 2004, he was a fellow of Hanse Institute for Advanced Study (Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg) and a visiting scientist at the University of Bremen, Institute of Brain Research, Human Neurobiology Laboratory. Presently he is Professor and Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Director of the Center for Neuro-Engineering and Cognitive Science at University of Houston.