Perceptual interference decays over short unfilled intervals

The perceptual interference effect refers to the fact that object identification is directly related to the amount of information available at initial exposure. The present article investigated whether perceptual interference would dissipate when a short, unfilled interval was introduced between exposures to a degraded object. Across three experiments using both musical and pictorial stimuli, identification performance increased directly with the length of the unfilled interval. Consequently, significant perceptual interference was obtained only when the interval between exposures was relatively short (< 500 msec for melodies; < 300 msec for pictures). These results are consistent with explanations that attribute perceptual interference to increased perceptual noise created by exposures to highly degraded objects. The data also suggest that perceptual interference is mediated by systems that are not consciously controlled by the subject and that perceptual interference in the visual domain decays more rapidly than perceptual interference in the auditory domain.