Recognition and memory for briefly presented scenes

Abstract

Three times per second, our eyes make a new fixation that generates a new bottom-up analysis in the visual system. How much is extracted from each glimpse? For how long and in what form is that information remembered? To answer these questions, investigators have mimicked the effect of continual shifts of fixation by using rapid serial visual presentation of sequences of unrelated pictures. Experiments in which viewers detect specified target pictures show that detection on the basis of meaning is possible at presentation durations as brief as 13 ms, suggesting that understanding may be based on feedforward processing, without feedback. In contrast, memory for what was just seen is poor unless the viewer has about 500 ms to think about the scene: the scene does not need to remain in view. Initial memory loss after brief presentations occurs over several seconds, suggesting that at least some of the information from the previous few fixations persists long enough to support a coherent representation of the current environment. In contrast to marked memory loss shortly after brief presentations, memory for pictures viewed for 1 s or more is excellent. Although some specific visual information persists, the form and content of the perceptual and memory representations of pictures over time indicate that conceptual information is extracted early and determines most of what remains in longer-term memory.

Keywords: detection; feedforward processing; masking; picture memory; picture perception; rapid serial visual presentation; search.

Figure 1

Examples of consistent scenes (top row) and inconsistent scenes (bottom row). In all cases, the central figure or object was photoshopped onto the background picture. Participants viewed only one of the versions of a given picture, and reported either the central object, the background setting, or both. From Davenport and Potter (2004).

Figure 2

An illustration of an RSVP sequence of pictures.

Figure 3

Proportion of pictures recognized following single masked presentations (solid curve, Potter, , Exp. 3) and proportion recognized after RSVP (dashed curves, two groups with different ranges of presentation durations; Potter and Levy, 1969). Data are corrected for guessing (see text footnote 1). Figure from Potter, .

Figure 4

Detection of a target picture in an RSVP sequence of 16 pictures, given a picture of the target or a name for the target, as a function of the presentation time per picture. Also shown is later recognition performance in a group that simply viewed the sequence, and then was tested for recognition. Results are corrected for guessing (see text footnote 1). From Potter (1976).

Figure 5

An example of an RSVP sequence in a search experiment in which participants reported the specific names of two exemplars of the search category. Here the exemplars are hamburger and spaghetti. From Potter et al. (2010).

Figure 6

Recognition test of five pictures shown in RSVP for 173 ms/picture; the test used pictures or titles. Guessing-corrected results (see text footnote 1) are shown as a function of relative position in the recognition test, which included five new pictures (distractors). From Potter et al. (2004).