REPLY TO “The meaningfulness of searching for minimal exposure duration to understand visual perception”

We welcome Mamassian and Wexler’s interest in our study 1 , as well as the opportunity to clarify why we agree with some of their points but reject their conclusion. Mamassian and Wexler posit that due to the visual system’s temporal integration characteristics, the manipulations of stimulus duration that we used are effectively contrast manipulations, and thus our findings, such as the shorter duration required to detect upright compared to inverted faces (a face inversion effect, FIE), may be due to upright faces having a lower contrast threshold. We completely agree that duration manipulations are manipulations of stimulus intensity. We firmly disagree, however, with Mamassian and Wexler’s assertion that this limits the value of using minimal exposure durations to reveal important properties of the visual system. Minimal durations are not only as useful as minimal contrasts for such purposes, but also offer distinct methodological advantages.