Recovery and nonmonotone masking effects.

Recovery was produced by a homogeneous flash of light (M2). With M2 absent, correct letter report was a U-shaped curve when plotted against the interval separating the onset of a letter target and the onset of a patterned masking stimulus (M1). With the homogeneous flash of light ed to the stimulus sequence (target + M1 + M2), recovery occurred for all the shortest delays between the onsets of target and M1. Recovery peaked at a constant separation between the onsets of the target and M2, regardless, of the separation between the onsets of the target and M1. Current explanations of recovery cannot account for this result.