The effect of flanking context on visual classification: The joint contribution of interactions at different processing levels

Flanking characters that surround a target character may cause either facilitation of or interference with target classification, depending on experimental context. In three different experiments, the patterns of facilitative priming and interference were shown to change systematically as a function of onset asynchrony between flankers and target, illustrating differing time courses of the overlapping processes that each contributes to overall reaction time performance