Temporal preparation facilitates perceptual identification of letters

Recent evidence has suggested that perceptual processing of single stimulus features improves when participants are temporally prepared for the occurrence of the stimuli. This study was conducted to investigate whether the benefit of temporal preparation generalizes to perceptual identification of more complex stimuli, such as letters. In three experiments, participants discriminated masked letters under high- and low-temporal-preparation conditions. Visual discrimination performance in all experiments improved when the participants were temporally prepared. Therefore, the present results support the notion that perception benefits from temporal preparation not only at the feature level, but also at subsequent levels at which feature information is integrated.