Colour and position processing in human visual perception

The relationship between the processing of colours in the patches made up of various colours and the processing of the positions occupied by these colours was investigated using the backward masking technique with two types of ‘noise’ which affected them differentially. Six subjects, all female undergraduates, took part in the experiments. The correlation between the numbers correct for colour and for position for individual patches was found practically nil. Moreover, deterioration of colour detection by noise did not have any effect upon detection of positions. When, instead of single patches of coloured targets, configurations of patches were used as units of analysis, some evidence was obtained to suggest that the two types of processing do interact. This might be due to the fact that they share some common resources.