Attempts to measure the termination of the icon by a patterned mask have been criticized on the grounds that S may confuse icon disappearance with mask arrival. Exp. I shows that Ss successfully detect actual temporal overlap of target and mask of as little as 10 msec. Exp. II shows that any information extracted from this target-mask integral is negligible compared to that extracted from targets alone. These results vindicate estimates of iconic readout rate which employ backward masking to control stimulus information availability.
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