Conceptual masking: how one picture captures attention from another picture.

When a masking picture follows some initial stimulus picture, subsequent memory performance for the stimulus is reduced, even when the mask is delayed by 300 ms following stimulus offset. Such a delay is sufftciently long that all perceptual traces of the stimulus have vanished, and therefore the inferred effect of the mask is to interrupt conceptual as opposed to perceptual processing of the stimulus. We define such a mask to be a conceptual mask, and we define its effect on a stimulus to be a conceptual masking effect. We report five experiments designed to investigate how conceptual masking operates, and to guide the development of a conceptual-processing model. We first tested the hypothesis that conceptual processing is continuously shared between stimulus and mask. This hypothesis was disconfirmed by the finding of an independent variable, conceptual mask duration, that influences memory for the mask itself, but not memory for the stimulus. We next tested the hypothesis that a mask captures conceptual processing from the target at the instant of mask onset. This hypothesis was disconfirmed by the finding that the conceptual-masking effect of a 50-ms mask can be removed if the mask is itself immediately followed by a second mask. These findings, along with many others in the literature, are consistent with a model which assumes that (1) conceptual processing cannot begin until acquisition of some criterion amount of perceptual information, (2) initiation of mask conceptual processing is a probabilistic event that is influenced by attention demands, and (3) initiation of mask conceptual processing causes cessation of stimulus conceptual processing, thereby constituting conceptual masking. We describe such a model along with its account of a large body of data. 8 1988 Academic press, h.