Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Marcel introduced ';masking'; in his modified Stroop Effect experiment. What is masking and how did he apply it?

I've read his procedures in textbooks and e-books but they're all so confusing. Somebody please explain in simpler detail.Marcel introduced ';masking'; in his modified Stroop Effect experiment. What is masking and how did he apply it?
Masking in cognitive psychology is the addition of irrelevant information (sometimes a cross, sometimes a gray square, gray noise...) so that the sensory level memory systems are overwritten. This way, you know the participant can't use the transient sensory information (afterimage in the case of visual information) to get a better performance.





Here is an example: you present a target stimuli for a very short time (50 ms), then you mask it by presenting a fuzzy gray pattern at the same location. Usually, you will find that participant to whom you present the mask will have much poorer performance in identifying the target than participants who ere in a no-mask condition.

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