Lages,M.
Treisman,M.

A long-term sensory memory is believed to account for spatial frequency discrimination when reference and test stimuli are separated by long intervals. We test an alternative proposal: that discrimination is determined by the range of test stimuli, through their entrainment of criterion-setting processes. Experiments 1 and 2 show that the 50% point of the psychometric function is largely determined by the midpoint of the stimulus range, not by the reference stimulus. Experiment 3 shows that discrimination of spatial frequencies is similarly affected by orthogonal contextual stimuli and parallel contextual stimuli and that these effects can be explained by criterion-setting processes. These findings support the hypothesis that discrimination over long intervals is explained by the operation of criterion-setting processes rather than by long-term sensory retention of a neural representation of the stimulus.

Lages, M., & Treisman, M. (1998). Spatial frequency discrimination: Visual long-term memory or criterion-setting? Vision Research, 38, 557-572.

Publication year	1998
Document type:	Article
Publication status:	Published
External URL:
Categories:	Memory
Keywords:	criterion settingdiscriminationsensory memorysequential dependenciesspatial frequency