Illustration of “dot-view” stimulus generation.

A) Target waveforms consisted of Gabor patterns or gratings. These were masked by replacing a proportion of the pixels depicting target waveforms (signal elements) with pixels depicting static white noise (noise elements). Signal elements can be thought of as windows, through which target waveforms can be seen. In this class of stimulus, the visibility of target waveforms can be adjusted by manipulating the proportion of signal elements to noise elements. B) Depiction of dot-view stimulus signal-to-noise ratio (SNR; proportion signal elements divided by proportion noise elements) 1.5. C) Depiction of dot-view stimulus SNR 0.33.