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Updated: Jul 18, 2026

Methods to Explore the Influence of Top-down Visual Processes on Motor Behavior
Published on: April 16, 2014
What you see is what you get: functional equivalence of a perceptually filled-in surface and a physically presented
Alejandro Lleras1, Cathleen M Moore
1Department of Psychology, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 603 East Daniel St., Champaign, IL 61820, USA. alleras@uiuc.edu
Abstract:
A perceptually filled-in surface, such as occurs during sustained attention to a peripheral stimulus (Troxler fading), can be functionally equivalent to a physically presented stimulus. Observers failed to detect probes that were presented in the location of a filled-in surface that had the same surface attributes as the probes; this was true even though, physically, the probes contrasted with the background. Probe stimuli with surface characteristics different from those of the filled-in surface were detected more often, though not quite as often as when there was no filled-in surface. Together, these findings support the idea that there are two components in perceptual filling: a neural filling-in component and a sustained-attention component, which actively suppresses perceptual processing at the filled-in location. More broadly, they illustrate the interplay of basic visual mechanisms in the creation and representation of visual surfaces and in the coding and detection of changes to these surfaces.
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