Poststimulus Cueing and Conceptual Categorization of Visual Information.

In a poststimulus cueing task subjects reported either the identity of items or their category membership. Results indicated that readout from Visual Information Storage (VIS) is not selective for conceptual categories. Rapid conceptual categorization of the type found in visual search experiments probably occurs at a processing stage subsequent to VIS readout. Another experiment demonstrated that subjects report category more accurately than identity when stimulus duration is 2 seconds, although there is no difference at .2 seconds. At the longer duration, superiority of category reports was correlated with subjective reports of processing strategy, suggesting that rapid categorization occurs when subjects encode and store information by category immediately after VIS readout. (Author/BJG)