Effect of stimulus contrast uncertainty on simple reaction time

Both reaction time (RT) and the latency of the visually evoked potentials (VEP) to grating onset increase with increasing stimulus spatial frequency (SF). At SF higher than 5 c/deg RT increases faster than VEP latency, the difference resulting in a "central delay" (Mihaylova et al., 1999). Due to the equipment limitations, RT and VEP experiments of Mihaylova et al. (1999) differed in constancy of stimulus contrast within a sequence of trials. The present experiments were aimed at testing the assumption that the central delay is a result of contrast uncertainty effect on RT. To this end, RT were measured in condition of both constant and variable grating contrast. The stimuli were sinusoidal gratings ranging in SF from 0.5 to 16 c/deg and in contrast from 2.5 to 50%. In addition, VEP were recorded to the same stimuli in blocks of fixed contrast and the latencies of the early VEP wave were subtracted from RT. Contrast uncertainty did not affect RT at low SF, 0.5 and 2 c/deg, while increasing RT at SF higher than 5 c/deg both at low and high stimulus contrast. The results showed that the central component of RT increase at high SF is reduced but not eliminated under constant contrast condition. The uncertainty effect at high SF might be due to contrast sensitivity reduction, reduced subjective stimulus probability and differences in response strategy adopted by the subjects when contrast was constant or variable. An alternative explanation is a larger ability of low SF stimuli compared to high SF stimuli to attract visual attention.