Scene masking is affected by trial blank-screen luminance

•We examine the impact of blank screen luminance on masking.•Blank screen luminance clearly affects the effectiveness of visual masking.•White blank screens cause the greatest detriment to scene-recognition performance at all SOAs.•Black blank screens cause greater detriment to scene-recognition performance at SOAs<36 ms than do gray blank screens set to the mean luminance of the stimuli.•Impacts on masking of black and gray blank screens are equivalent after 36 ms.

The current study investigated the role of the inter-screen luminance contrast (ISLC) of trial blank screens between target and mask screens in visually masking scenes. Participants performed a scene gist recognition task in which we varied mask strength, blank screen luminance, and stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA). Results showed that the more luminant white, and less luminant black, blank screens produced greater masking than intermediate luminance gray blank screens adjusted to the mean luminance of the target screens, specifically for black screens at SOAs<36 ms and for white screens at all SOAs. Our findings suggest that researchers interested in controlling for ‘extraneous factors’ should use gray blank screens as they eliminate any contribution of the ISLC component of masking. However, researchers interested in creating and examining differences in processing at early SOAs (<36 ms) should use black blank screens as these were shown to increase variation in the SOA function.