Section headings: Foreword; Introduction -- The Problem of Visual Masking; Facts and the Theories of Visual Masking; The Conception of Perceptual Retouch and its Experimental Control; The Psychophysiological Modelling from Short-Term Images; Conclusions.

Visual masking is a technique used in cognitive research to understand pre-conscious processes (priming, for example), consciousness, visual limits, and perception issues associated with psychopathology. This book is a short format review of research using visual masking: how it has been used, and what these experiments have discovered.Topics covered include concepts, varieties, and theories of masking; masking and microgenetic mechanisms and stagesof visual processing; psychopharmacological and genetic factors in masking, and more. Provides succinct information about the widely dispersed masking studies and points out some new trends in masking research Reviews transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) as an alternative to the traditional psychophysical masking methods Comments on the methodological pitfalls hidden in the practice of masking, helping to improve the quality of future research where masking is used as a tool Informs readers about recent developments in theoretical attempts to understand masking

Where most current approaches to the study of visual consciousness adopt a 'steady-state' view, the approach presented in this book explores its dynamic properties down to a resolution in the millisecond range."--BOOK JACKET.

Originally published in 1988, in several respects this book is a tribute to the outstanding career of the late Donald B. Lindsley (1907-2003) who, over a span of more than 55 years, had contributed greatly to the development of research in the fields of neurophysiology, psychophysiology, and experimental psychology. The impetus for the book was a conference held at UCLA to honor Professor Lindsley for his numerous and significant contributions to psychology. The chapters of this book have been written by Professor Lindsley’s colleagues and co-workers, and by former students and postdoctoral fellows. The introductory chapter, written by Lindsley himself, tells of 2000 years of "pondering". The chapter is a discussion of the lengthy history of neurophysiology, psychophysiology, and behaviour. Many of the topics mentioned in this chapter are subsequently presented in the book as reports of ongoing research in the field.

Motion processing is an essential piece of the complex brain machinery that allows us to reconstruct the 3D layout of objects in the environment, to break camouflage, to perform scene segmentation, to estimate the ego movement, and to control our action. Although motion perception and its neural basis have been a topic of intensive research and modeling the last two decades, recent experimental evidences have stressed the dynamical aspects of motion integration and segmentation. This book presents the most recent approaches that have changed our view of biological motion processing. These new experimental evidences call for new models emphasizing the collective dynamics of large population of neurons rather than the properties of separate individual filters. Chapters will stress how the dynamics of motion processing can be used as a general approach to understand the brain dynamics itself.