Perception of successive targets presented in invariant-item streams

When two successive, spatially overlapping, targets (S1 and S2) are presented on a blank background, S2 typically dominates in explicit perception. We tested whether S2 dominance is also found for the conditions of presenting S1 and S2 in a stream of irrelevant objects. Successive target letters were presented within a stream of invariant stimulus items (capital Is). The stream items were presented either as a perceptually continuous object where both type and token appeared invariant (60-Hz stream) or as a flickering stream of successive replicas of the invariant stationary object where the type appeared invariant but the token appearance seemed intermittent (20-Hz condition). Compared to the control condition where targets were presented on a blank background we found that (1) recognition rate was lower for targets embedded in a perceptually continuous type-and-token object (60 Hz), but was unchanged for targets in a perceptually flickering sequence of the invariant-object tokens (20 Hz); (2) S1 recognition rate was higher compared to S2 recognition rate within the first epoch of stream (0-150 ms) while within the later stream-epochs S2 dominated over S1 as usual; (3) the overall difference in recognition rates between S1 and S2 was decreased. The results are discussed in the theoretical context of visual masking and attentional blink.