Department of Experimental Psychology, Georg-Elias-Müller Institute of Psychology, Georg-August University Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany.
Psychophysiology. 2022 Nov;59(11):e14085. doi: 10.1111/psyp.14085. Epub 2022 Apr 28.
Temporal integration and segregation have been investigated both in the research on the temporal mechanisms in visual perception and in the research on visual masking. Although both research lines share theoretical, methodological, and empirical similarities, there is little overlap between them and their models of temporal processing are incompatible. As a first step toward the unification of both lines of research, we investigated the electrophysiological correlates of temporal integration and segregation in a metacontrast masking paradigm. Participants reported in each trial whether they perceived the target-mask sequence as a simultaneous or temporally segregated percept while their EEG was recorded. A comparison of both temporal report categories resulted in an ERP difference after stimulus presentation (200-450 ms) that closely resembles the contour integration negativity. Moreover, we found that phase states were shifted between perceptual report categories in the alpha (450-250 ms) and beta (225-125 ms) frequency band before stimulus presentation and induced a sinusoidal periodicity in later temporal report proportions. Thus, we show that neural correlates of temporal integration and segregation can be generalized to metacontrast masking. These findings emphasize the potential role of temporal mechanisms in the emergence of the masking phenomenon. Additionally, our findings validate our phenomenological approach by demonstrating similar neural correlates of temporal integration and segregation as in performance-based tasks. Future research may profit from our phenomenological approach to disentangle the (neural) interplay between temporal and masking mechanisms.
时间整合和分离在视觉感知的时间机制研究和视觉掩蔽研究中都得到了研究。尽管这两条研究路线在理论、方法和经验上都有相似之处，但它们之间几乎没有重叠，而且它们的时间处理模型也不兼容。作为将这两条研究路线统一起来的第一步，我们在对比掩蔽范式中研究了时间整合和分离的电生理相关性。在每次试验中，参与者报告他们是否将目标-掩蔽序列感知为同时或时间分离的知觉，同时记录他们的 EEG。对这两种时间报告类别的比较导致在刺激呈现后（200-450ms）出现了一个 ERP 差异，该差异与轮廓整合负波非常相似。此外，我们发现，在刺激呈现之前，在 alpha（450-250ms）和 beta（225-125ms）频段中，相位状态在知觉报告类别之间发生了转移，并在后期的时间报告比例中诱导了正弦周期性。因此，我们表明，时间整合和分离的神经相关性可以推广到对比掩蔽。这些发现强调了时间机制在掩蔽现象出现中的潜在作用。此外，我们的发现通过证明与基于绩效的任务中相似的时间整合和分离的神经相关性验证了我们的现象学方法。未来的研究可能会受益于我们的现象学方法，以分离时间和掩蔽机制之间的（神经）相互作用。
