Reiss Jason E, Hoffman James E
Department of Psychology, University of Delaware, Newark 19716, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2006 Dec;17(12):1015-20. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01820.x.
Object substitution masking (OSM) refers to impaired target identification caused by common onset, but delayed offset, of a surrounding dot mask. This effect has been hypothesized to reflect reentrant processes that result in the mask replacing the target representation. However, little is known about the depth of processing associated with masked targets in this paradigm. We investigated this issue by examining the effect of OSM on the N400 component of the event-related potential, which reflects the degree of semantic mismatch between a target and its context. Participants read a context word followed by a semantically related or unrelated target word surrounded by dots. As expected, delayed dot offset significantly reduced accuracy in identifying the target. The N400 amplitude was also diminished by OSM. These findings offer the first evidence that substitution interferes with target processing prior to semantic analysis, demonstrating an important difference between OSM and other visual phenomena, such as the attentional blink, in which semantic processing is independent of awareness.
客体替代掩蔽（OSM）是指由周围点状掩蔽物的同时出现但延迟消失所导致的目标识别受损。据推测，这种效应反映了折返过程，该过程导致掩蔽物取代目标表征。然而，在这种范式下，对于与被掩蔽目标相关的加工深度知之甚少。我们通过研究OSM对事件相关电位的N400成分的影响来探究这个问题，N400成分反映了目标与其语境之间语义不匹配的程度。参与者先阅读一个语境词，然后是一个由点包围的语义相关或不相关的目标词。正如预期的那样，点状掩蔽物延迟消失显著降低了目标识别的准确性。OSM也减小了N400的波幅。这些发现首次证明了替代在语义分析之前就干扰了目标加工，表明了OSM与其他视觉现象（如注意瞬脱，其中语义加工独立于意识）之间的重要差异。
