Search

Viewers were presented with a rapid sequence of very brief stimulus pairs, each of which consisted of a pictured object followed by a related or unrelated word. The form of relatedness between the picture and word was manipulated across experiments (identical concept, associated concept, ink color of the picture). Recognition memory for the pictures was affected not only by whether or not paired items were conceptually identical or semantically related, but also by whether or not the words named an irrelevant feature, ink color. These results show that sequential items are integrated on the basis of similarity at whatever level is available, so that the stability of the memory representation of one or both items is increased. We propose that a common mechanism may underlie integration, priming, and selective attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies the role of phonology and orthography in silent Chinese compound-character reading using a semantic relatedness judgment task. Interference from a homophone of a target word semantically related to a cue word; Interference from orthographically similar nonhomophones of the targets; Phonology-first verification model.

Attentional capture is an unintentional shift of visuospatial attention to the location of a distractor that is either highly salient, or relevant to the current task set. The latter situation is referred to as contingent capture, in that the effect is contingent on a match between characteristics of the stimuli and the task-defined attentional-control settings of the viewer. Contingent capture has been demonstrated for low-level features, such as color, motion, and orientation. In the present paper we show that contingent capture can also occur for conceptual information at the superordinate level (e.g., sports equipment, marine animal, dessert food). This effect occurs rapidly (i.e., within 200 ms), is a spatial form of attention, and is contingent on attentional-control settings that change on each trial, suggesting that natural images can be decoded into their conceptual meaning to drive shifts of attention within the time course of a single fixation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transient attention to a visually salient cue enhances processing of a subsequent target in the same spatial location between 50 to 150 ms after cue onset (K. Nakayama & M. Mackeben, 1989). Do stimuli from a categorically defined target set, such as letters or digits, also generate transient attention? Participants reported digit targets among keyboard symbols in a changing array of 8 items. When 1 target preceded a second target in the same location at a stimulus onset asynchrony of 107 ms (but not 213 ms), the second target was reported more often than in a condition in which there was no leading target. When the 2 targets were at different locations, report of the second target was impaired. With both letters and digits as targets, the enhancement effect was shown not to be due to category priming. Critically, the attentional benefit was present whether or not participants reported the leading target. Transient attention, contingent attentional capture, popout, and Lag 1 sparing in the attentional blink may involve a common mechanism for orienting processing resources towards salient and task relevant stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prospect of speed reading—reading at an increased speed without any loss of comprehension—has undeniable appeal. Speed reading has been an intriguing concept for decades, at least since Evelyn Wood introduced her Reading Dynamics training program in 1959. It has recently increased in popularity, with speed-reading apps and technologies being introduced for smartphones and digital devices. The current article reviews what the scientific community knows about the reading process—a great deal—and discusses the implications of the research findings for potential students of speed-reading training programs or purchasers of speed-reading apps. The research shows that there is a trade-off between speed and accuracy. It is unlikely that readers will be able to double or triple their reading speeds (e.g., from around 250 to 500–750 words per minute) while still being able to understand the text as well as if they read at normal speed. If a thorough understanding of the text is not the reader’s goal, then speed reading or skimming the text will allow the reader to get through it faster with moderate comprehension. The way to maintain high comprehension and get through text faster is to practice reading and to become a more skilled language user (e.g., through increased vocabulary). This is because language skill is at the heart of reading speed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long-term recognition memory for some pictures is consistently better than for others (Isola, Xiao, Parikh, Torralba, & Oliva, IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), 36(7), 1469-1482, 2014). Here, we investigated whether pictures found to be memorable in a long-term memory test are also perceived more easily when presented in ultra-rapid RSVP. Participants viewed 6 pictures they had never seen before that were presented for 13 to 360 ms per picture in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) sequence. In half the trials, one of the pictures was a memorable or a nonmemorable picture and perception of this picture was probed by a visual recognition test at the end of the sequence. Recognition for pictures from the memorable set was higher than for those from the nonmemorable set, and this difference increased with increasing duration. Nonmemorable picture recognition was low initially, did not increase until 120 ms, and never caught up with memorable picture recognition performance. Thus, the long-term memorability of an image is associated with initial perceptibility: A picture that is hard to grasp quickly is hard to remember later.

Pictured objects and scenes can be understood in a brief glimpse, but there is a debate about whether they are first encoded at the basic level (e.g., banana), as proposed by Rosch et al. (1976, Cognitive Psychology) , or at a superordinate level (e.g., fruit). The level at which we first categorize an object matters in everyday situations because it determines whether we approach, avoid, or ignore the object. In the present study, we limited stimulus duration in order to explore the earliest level of object understanding. Target objects were presented among five other pictures using RSVP at 80, 53, 27, or 13 ms/picture. On each trial, participants viewed or heard 1 of 28 superordinate names or a corresponding basic-level name of the target. The name appeared before or after the picture sequence. Detection (as d') improved as duration increased but was significantly above chance in all conditions and for all durations. When the name was given before the sequence, d' was higher for the basic than for the superordinate name, showing that specific advance information facilitated visual encoding. In the name-after group, performance on the two category levels did not differ significantly; this suggests that encoding had occurred at the basic level during presentation, allowing the superordinate category to be inferred. We interpret the results as being consistent with the claim that the basic level is usually the entry level for object perception.

We can recognize thousands of individual objects in scores of familiar settings, and yet we see most of them only through occasional glances that are quickly forgotten. How do we come to recognize any of these objects? Here, we show that when objects are presented intermittently for durations of single fixations, the originally fleeting memories become gradually stabilized, such that, after just eight separated fixations, recognition memory after half an hour is as good as during an immediate memory test. However, with still shorter presentation durations, memories take more exposures to stabilize. Our results thus suggest that repeated glances suffice to remember the objects of our environment.

Language and concepts are intimately linked, but how do they interact? In the study reported here, we probed the relation between conceptual and linguistic processing at the earliest processing stages. We presented observers with sequences of visual scenes lasting 200 or 250 ms per picture. Results showed that observers understood and remembered the scenes' abstract gist and, therefore, their conceptual meaning. However, observers remembered the scenes at least as well when they simultaneously performed a linguistic secondary task (i.e., reading and retaining sentences); in contrast, a nonlinguistic secondary task (equated for difficulty with the linguistic task) impaired scene recognition. Further, encoding scenes interfered with performance on the nonlinguistic task and vice versa, but scene processing and performing the linguistic task did not affect each other. At the earliest stages of conceptual processing, the extraction of meaning from visually presented linguistic stimuli and the extraction of conceptual information from the world take place in remarkably independent channels.

In whole report, a sentence presented sequentially at the rate of about 10 words/s can be recalled accurately, whereas if the task is to report only two target words (e.g., red words), the second target suffers an attentional blink if it appears shortly after the first target. If these two tasks are carried out simultaneously, is there an attentional blink, and does it affect both tasks? Here, sentence report was combined with report of two target words (Experiments 1 and 2) or two inserted target digits, Arabic numerals or word digits (Experiments 3 and 4). When participants reported only the targets an attentional blink was always observed. When they reported both the sentence and targets, sentence report was quite accurate but there was an attentional blink in picking out the targets when they were part of the sentence. When targets were extra digits inserted in the sentence there was no blink when viewers also reported the sentence. These results challenge some theories of the attentional blink: Blinks result from online selection, not perception or memory.

Is one's temporal perception of the world truly as seamless as it appears? This article presents a computationally motivated theory suggesting that visual attention samples information from temporal episodes (episodic simultaneous type/serial token model; Wyble, Bowman, & Nieuwenstein, 2009). Breaks between these episodes are punctuated by periods of suppressed attention, better known as the attentional blink (Raymond, Shapiro, & Arnell, 1992). We test predictions from this model and demonstrate that participants were able to report more letters from a sequence of 4 targets presented in a dense temporal cluster than from a sequence of 4 targets interleaved with nontargets. However, this superior report accuracy comes at a cost in impaired temporal order perception. Further experiments explore the dynamics of multiple episodes and the boundary conditions that trigger episodic breaks. Finally, we contrast the importance of attentional control, limited resources, and memory capacity constructs in the model.

A pictured object can be readily detected in a rapid serial visual presentation sequence when the target is specified by a superordinate category name such as animal or vehicle. Are category features the initial basis for detection, with identification of the specific object occurring in a second stage (Evans & Treisman, 2005), or is identification of the object the basis for detection? When 2 targets in the same superordinate category are presented successively (lag 1), only the identification-first hypothesis predicts lag 1 sparing of the second target. The results of 2 experiments with novel pictures and a wide range of categories supported the identification-first hypothesis and a transient-attention model of lag 1 sparing and the attentional blink (Wyble, Bowman, & Potter, 2009).

When asked to identify 2 visual targets (T1 and T2 for the 1st and 2nd targets, respectively) embedded in a sequence of distractors, observers will often fail to identify T2 when it appears within 200-500 ms of T1--an effect called the attentional blink. Recent work shows that attention does not blink when the task is to encode a sequence of consecutive targets, suggesting that distractor interference plays a causal role in the attentional blink. Here, however, the authors show that an attentional blink occurs even in the absence of distractors, with 2 letter targets separated by a blank interval. In addition, the authors found that the impairment for identification of the 2nd of 2 targets separated by a blank interval is substantially attenuated either when the intertarget interval is filled with additional target items or when the 2nd target is precued by an additional target. These findings show that the root cause of the blink lies in the difficulty of engaging attention twice within a short period of time for 2 temporally discrete target events., (Copyright 2009 APA, all rights reserved.)

Viewers can easily spot a target picture in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), but can they do so if more than 1 picture is presented simultaneously? Up to 4 pictures were presented on each RSVP frame, for 240 to 720 ms/frame. In a detection task, the target was verbally specified before each trial (e.g., man with violin); in a memory task, recognition was tested after each sequence. Target detection was much better than recognition memory, but in both tasks the more pictures on the frame, the lower the performance. When the presentation duration was set at 160 ms with a variable interframe interval such that the total times were the same as in the initial experiments, the results were similar. The results suggest that visual processing occurs in 2 stages: fast, global processing of all pictures in Stage 1 (usually sufficient for detection) and slower, serial processing in Stage 2 (usually necessary for subsequent memory)., (Copyright 2009 APA, all rights reserved.)

Objects in a scene are often partially occluded without causing the viewer any problem: the occluded parts are apparently represented via amodal completion. To evaluate human ability to perceive and remember partially occluded pictures, we showed sequences of pictures using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) for durations of 53 ms, 107 ms, 213 ms, or 426 ms/picture. Participants either attempted to detect a named target (e.g., "businessmen at table") or were given a yes-no recognition memory test of one item. In Experiment 1, with as much as 30% of the picture area covered, detection and recognition were both well above chance. More interestingly, occlusion significantly affected recognition memory but not target detection. In Experiment 2, when pictures were inverted, occlusion impaired detection as severely as recognition. For target detection, the interaction between occlusion and inversion was significant. By contrast, taking away color information did not significantly reduce detection's tolerance of occlusion (Experiment 3). Finally, Experiment 4 showed that with 40% of the picture area occluded, detection performance was impaired. These results support the hypothesis that contextual gist information facilitates visual processes that tolerate occluding noise. Although inversion and color were tested in particular, the presented paradigm can also be used to investigate the role of other factors in gist representation.

A sentence is readily understood and recalled when presented 1 word at a time using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) at 10 words/s (Potter, 1984). In contrast, selecting just 2 colored letters at 10 letters/s results in easy detection of the first target but poor recall for the second when it appears 200-500 ms later. This attentional blink disappears when all letters must be reported; instead, performance drops more gradually over serial position (Nieuwenstein & Potter, 2006). Would target words in sentences escape an attentional blink? Subjects either reported 2 target words (in red or uppercase) or the whole 10-word sentence. There was a blink for Target 2 in partial report, but that target was easily remembered in whole report. With scrambled sentences whole report dropped but partial report was unaffected, again showing a blink. The attentional blink is not due to memory processing of Target 1, but to target selection, which is incompatible with sentence processing.

People often fail to recall the second of two visual targets presented within 500 ms in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). This effect is called the attentional blink. One explanation of the attentional blink is that processes involved in encoding the first target into memory are slow and capacity limited. Here, however, we show that the attentional blink should be ascribed to attentional selection, not consolidation of the first target. Rapid sequences of six letters were presented, and observers had to report either all the letters (whole-report condition) or a subset of the letters (partial-report condition). Selection in partial report was based on color (e.g., report the two red letters) or identity (i.e., report all letters from a particular letter onward). In both cases, recall of letters presented shortly after the first selected letter was impaired, whereas recall of the corresponding letters was relatively accurate with whole report.

Pictures seen in a rapid sequence are remembered briefly, but most are forgotten within a few seconds (M. C. Potter. A. Staub, J. Rado. & D. H. O'Connor. 2002). The authors investigated the pictorial and conceptual components of this fleeting memory by presenting 5 pictured scenes and immediately testing recognition of verbal titles (e.g., people at a table) or recognition of the pictures themselves. Recognition declined during testing, but initial performance was higher and the decline steeper when pictures were tested. A final experiment included test decoy pictures that were conceptually similar to but visually distinct from the original pictures. Yeses to decoys were higher than yeses to other distractors. Fleeting memory for glimpsed pictures has a strong conceptual component (conceptual short-term memory), but there is additional highly volatile pictorial memory (pictorial short-term memory) that is not tapped hy a gist title or decoy picture., (((c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved))