The current findings demonstrate that the faster access to awareness of target stimuli matching the content of VWM is potentiated by a lowering of the effective threshold (i.e., the threshold
b) for matching compared to mismatching target stimuli. From these data, however, it is unclear whether the difference in threshold reflects differential processing of a matching target stimulus (a) before or (b) after the target stimulus is released from interocular suppression. Gayet et al.'s (
2013) experiments 2 and 3 demonstrate that when the target stimulus is not interocularly suppressed, response times do not differ between targets that match and mismatch the content of VWM. In these so-called monocular control experiments, the target stimuli are presented to the same eye as the CFS masks, and their opacity is gradually ramped up. Because the target stimuli are presented to the eye that already dominates perception, these experiments only capture differences in response time that are initiated after the interocular competition is resolved. As response times did not differ between trial types in these experiments, we concluded that the difference in response time that is obtained in conditions of interocular competition (e.g., the current experiment, and experiments 1, 4, and 5 of Gayet et al.,
2013) reflects a difference in suppression duration, rather than a difference in response speed to the target stimulus once it is no longer suppressed (for more elaborate discussion on this topic, see Gayet et al.,
2014; Gayet, Paffen, Belopolsky, Theeuwes, & Van der Stigchel,
2016; Stein, Hebart, & Sterzer,
2011). Similarly, we aimed to assert that the lowered effective threshold for stimuli matching the content of VWM reflects a difference in processing before the target stimuli are visible. For this purpose, we reanalyzed the data of Gayet et al.'s (
2013) experiment 3, in which the targets were not interocularly suppressed, by fitting it using a one-sided accumulator model (the shifted Wald model; Anders et al.,
2016). In this experiment (
N = 11), targets either matched the color category of the memorized stimulus or not (36 trials per trial type). Only correct trials (99.4%) were included in the analyses.