How Does The Visual Marking Work Under Illusion Paradigm

The phenomenon of visual marking (VM) has been extensively investigated, and so far there exist three major hypotheses about its working mechanism: the inhibition template hypothesis; the abrupt onset hypothesis and the temporal grouping hypothesis. Although each of the hypotheses about VM has been supported by much experiment evidence, none can provide a complete account of known results. In the current study, we developed a new paradigm to investigate the mechanism and characteristics of VM with three experiments. In the first experiment, the Ebbinghause illusion picture was used as materials to measure and compare the PSE (point of subjective equality) under two conditions: the baseline and temporal gap condition. The result indicated that the temporal gap could diminish the effect of illusion. This is the basic preview effect under the illusion paradigm. In the following two experiments, we further investigated the core hypothesis about VM that the location of old items was inhibited during preview period, and the participants could only prioritize the new items over the old items.The main findings of this study are as follows:(1) There is a preview effect under the visual illusion paradigm.(2) The preview effects were still found even the old items held the same place with new items. Thus the process of VM under illusion paradigm can not explained by the location inhibition hypothesis.(3) The old items could also be selected when they were the task-relevant stimulus, which can not explained by the abrupt onset hypothesis. However, it is a good support to the temporal grouping hypothesis.These results suggested that VM is a common phenomenon wherein temporal cues are used for selected attention. During its process, the temporal gap is used to group the stimuli in their visual field, and attention is distributed to sub-groups more relevant to the major task.