Neural correlates of temporal integration and segregation in metacontrast masking: A phenomenological study

Temporal integration and segregation have been investigated both in the research on the temporal mechanisms in visual perception and in the research on visual masking. Although both research lines share theoretical, methodological, and empirical similarities, there is little overlap between them and their models of temporal processing are incompatible. As a first step toward the unification of both lines of research, we investigated the electrophysiological correlates of temporal integration and segregation in a metacontrast masking paradigm. Participants reported in each trial whether they perceived the target-mask sequence as a simultaneous or temporally segregated percept while their EEG was recorded. A comparison of both temporal report categories resulted in an ERP difference after stimulus presentation (200-450 ms) that closely resembles the contour integration negativity. Moreover, we found that phase states were shifted between perceptual report categories in the alpha (450-250 ms) and beta (225-125 ms) frequency band before stimulus presentation and induced a sinusoidal periodicity in later temporal report proportions. Thus, we show that neural correlates of temporal integration and segregation can be generalized to metacontrast masking. These findings emphasize the potential role of temporal mechanisms in the emergence of the masking phenomenon. Additionally, our findings validate our phenomenological approach by demonstrating similar neural correlates of temporal integration and segregation as in performance-based tasks. Future research may profit from our phenomenological approach to disentangle the (neural) interplay between temporal and masking mechanisms.