Introduction
Associations between image masking and psychopathology are heavily investigated, with major tests focusing on cognition and perception differences in patients with mental developmental challenges. An investigator’s motivation in conducting backward masking experiment is to determine how people with cognitive disorders respond differently to visual stimuli than people without disorders (Fernandes et al., 2019). Basic questions answered about the mind in explorative setups are the roles of cognitive and perceptual processes in judgment. A visual experiment answers questions by providing continuous numerical data to explain relationships between cognitive abilities and mental stimuli processing. My results on the stimulus onset synchrony would show great performance on immediate masking and delays greater than 200 milliseconds, whereas delays between the range would result in poor visual performance.
Methods
Items and stimuli:
- A black rectangle.
- Squares.
- Smaller rectangles.
- Checked boxes (mask).
- Timer.
The research procedure follows a timed experiment with several trials beginning with a fixation point displayed in the middle of the black rectangle. The first step is to focus on the fixation point before four stimuli (three squares and a rectangle) appear around the fixation region. The first experiment’s stimuli are shown for 30 milliseconds before a box is drawn around each stimulus for another 30 milliseconds. A participant’s task is to identify accurate locations of the stimuli after they are masked, with varying stimuli delay durations.
Results
The experiment, which lasted 31 minutes, led to different findings from the author’s hypothesis. The metacontrast perception performance was high for immediate masking, lowest at the 30 milliseconds SOA, and improved from the 60 milliseconds SOA. The peak performance was at 120 milliseconds SOA, although it dropped from 150 milliseconds onwards. The tables and data illustrating the findings are attached to the page below.
Conclusions
My experiment refuted the hypothesis because it did not conform to the conventional U-shaped perception performance results as suggested in the theoretical background. The rationale is that, although perception performance was highest at 0 milliseconds delay, the rest of the exposure results did not conform to the expected accuracies. The experiment determines an individual’s cognitive processing ability in real-life. However, possible errors that can occur during the experimental data collection are an environmental distraction from the stimuli on the screen. An ideal follow-up experiment would be to subject a participant to multiple backward mask visual testing and then use the average results to tabulate data.
Tables and Figures
Table 1: SOA against proportion correct
References
Fernandes, T. P., Shaqiri, A., Brand, A., Nogueira, R. L., Herzog, M. H., Roinishvili, M., Santos, N., & Chkonia, E. (2019). Schizophrenia patients using atypical medication perform better in visual tasks than patients using typical medication. Psychiatry Research, 275, 31-38. Web.