King D L, Brown P D, Hicks H
Department of Psychology, Howard University, Washington, DC 20059, USA. don/
Percept Mot Skills. 1998 Dec;87(3 Pt 2):1299-309. doi: 10.2466/pms.1998.87.3f.1299.
The present research tested the theory that a less visible target increases in similarity to a more visible simultaneous context, and that therefore the target increases in visibility. This assimilation-in-visibility theory was tested using context + targets that were either 3-line brackets or 2-line right angles, contexts and targets that were the component lines of these context + targets, with the target always the identical single top line. Experiments with a total of 204 participants indicated that the 3-line context + targets resulted in better context + target versus context discriminations than target versus background discriminations than did the 2-line context + targets. This was so for both over-all errors and misses but not false alarms. It is concluded that only the 3-line context + targets increased the visibility of the 1-line target. Additional analysis indicated that the 2-line contexts of the 3-line context + targets were more visible than all the 1-line stimuli. So, the 1-line target assimilated to a simultaneous more visible 2-line context and thereby increased in visibility, thus improving the context + target versus context discrimination. This support for the assimilation-in-visibility theory is of interest because assimilation and contrast in visibility may play a large role in perception.
