The time course of psychophysical end-stopping

This study measured the time course of psychophysical end-stopping and compared it with the time course of masking. For a 10' D6 target on an 18' D6 pedestal, two abutting end-zone masks (each 13.5' long) covering the filter end-zones reduce masking. This facilitatory 'end-stopping' effect was measured over a range of exposure durations and stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). We found that psychophysical end-stopping has a delayed onset which is around 70-100 ms after stimulus onset, in contrast to masking which is robust immediately after stimulus onset, suggesting intracortical feedback processes in the generation of psychophysical end-stopping. The development course of psychophysical end-stopping is relatively long and lasts for approximately 150-200 ms after stimulus onset, in contrast to that of masking which lasts for approximately 100-150 ms. Our results also showed that end-stopping occurs only when the center mask and the end-zone masks have sufficient temporal overlap, possibly indicating that the feedback process for generating end-stopping is triggered by the activation of the spatial filter center by the center mask. These results are in tune with current knowledge of intracortical feedback modulating activities of receptive fields, and have been incorporated into our model to describe the temporal dynamics within end-stopped spatial filters.