Visual Masking ─ Studying Perception, Attention, and Consciousness

Visual masking is a technique used in cognitive research to understand pre-conscious processes (e.g., priming), consciousness, visual limits, and perception issues associated with psychopathology. This work is a short format review of research using visual masking: how it’s been used, and what these experiments have discovered. It’s a strategic fit to our other cognitive psychology titles.

The aims of this work are:

• helping the interested reader to get succinct information about the widely dispersed masking studies and to point out some new trends in masking research
• add the effects of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) as a new method to the traditional psychophysical masking methods and present a review of this new trend
• comment on the methodological pitfalls hidden in the practice of masking thus helping to improve the quality of future research where masking is used as a tool
• inform readers about recent developments in theoretical attempts to understand masking