Psychophysics studies have shown that subjects can hold a representation of basic visual information such as letters (Sperling,
1960) or flashing arrays of squares or dots (Brockmole, Wang, & Irwin,
2002; Hogben & Di Lollo,
1974) in “iconic memory” for a short time after presentation. The recognition of a whole object can be facilitated when presented in close temporal contiguity and spatial register with one of its parts (Sanocki,
2001), demonstrating that varying the dynamics with which object information is presented can influence perception. Prior studies of temporal integration in terms of interference between parts of different faces (Anaki, Boyd, & Moscovitch,
2007; Cheung, Richler, Phillips, & Gauthier,
2011; Singer & Sheinberg,
2006), emotion recognition (Schyns, Petro, & Smith,
2007), and extraction of low-level shape features (Aspell, Wattam-Bell, & Braddick,
2006; Clifford, Holcombe, & Pearson,
2004) have found relevant time scales in the range of several tens to a few hundred milliseconds. Longer integration windows, up to several seconds, have been reported in studies of motion discrimination (Burr & Santoro,
2001) and biological motion discrimination (Neri, Morrone, & Burr,
1998).