AUTHOR=Di Lollo Vincent 

TITLE=Reentrant processing mediates object substitution masking: comment on Põder (2013)

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=5

YEAR=2014

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00819

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00819

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=<p>Object-substitution masking (OSM) occurs when a target stimulus and a surrounding mask are displayed briefly together, and the display then continues with the mask alone. Target identification is accurate when the stimuli co-terminate but is progressively impaired as the duration of the trailing mask is increased. In reentrant accounts, OSM is said to arise from iterative exchanges between brain regions connected by two-way pathways. In an alternative account, OSM is explained on the basis of exclusively feed-forward processes, without recourse to reentry. Here I show that the feed-forward account runs afoul of the extant phenomenological, behavioral, brain-imaging, and electrophysiological evidence. Further, the feed-forward assumption that masking occurs when attention finds a degraded target is shown to be entirely <italic>ad hoc</italic>. In contrast, the evidence is uniformly consistent with a reentrant-processing account of OSM.</p>