Mary C Potter

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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 pres...

Humans can detect target colour pictures of scenes depicting concepts like picnic or harbour in sequences of six or 12 pictures presented as briefly as 13 ms, even when the target is named after the sequence. Such rapid detection suggests that feedforward processing alone enabled detection without recurrent cortical feedback. There is debate about...

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 in...

Rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of words or pictured scenes provides evidence for a large-capacity conceptual short-term memory (CSTM) that momentarily provides rich associated material from long-term memory, permitting rapid chunking (Potter 1993; 2009; 2012). In perception of scenes as well as language comprehension, we make use of knowle...

Temporal yoking has been shown to enhance performance in dual auditory-visual tasks (Jiang & Swallow, 2014). Here we investigate the relative timing of a picture target in an RSVP sequence and the spoken name of the target. Prior studies (Potter, Wyble, Hagmann, & McCourt, 2014) showed that presenting a written target name 900 ms before the visual...

This chapter proposes that conceptual information is extracted early in the visual process and forms what people remember later. By examining continual shifts of fixation by using rapid series visual sequences of unrelated pictures, the discussion shows that initial memory for a briefly presented picture is relatively accurate but declines slowly a...

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...

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 be...

The visual system is exquisitely adapted to the task of extracting conceptual information from visual input with every new eye fixation, three or four times a second. Here we assess the minimum viewing time needed for visual comprehension, using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of a series of six or 12 pictures presented at between 13 and 80...

Visual working memory (WM) capacity is thought to be limited to 3 or 4 items. However, many cognitive activities seem to require larger temporary memory stores. Here, we provide evidence for a temporary memory store with much larger capacity than past WM capacity estimates. Further, based on previous WM research, we show that a single factor-proact...

Background / Purpose: Feedforward models of visual processing propose that an initial wave of neural activity from the retina to the cortex, without feedback and without specific expectation, can be sufficient to identify a visual stimulus. Other theories, however, propose that conscious awareness requires feedback between levels or specific adva...

The present paper examines the effects of memory contents and memory load in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) speeded tasks, trying to explain previous inconsistent results. We used a one target (Experiment 1) and a two-target (Experiment 2) RSVP task with a concurrent memory load of one or four items, in a dual-task paradigm. A relation bet...

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-con...

It is well established that stimuli can capture attention if they possess a target defining feature such as color or motion. The present study explored whether images belonging to a conceptually specified target category, such as Sports equipment can also capture attention. There were 29 different categories, which were used to create 80 trials for...

Last year we reported preliminary results (since replicated) showing above-chance detection of a picture in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) on the basis of a verbal title given just before the sequence (e.g., cut up fruit), at a duration as short as 13 ms/picture. Here we report that viewers can recognize that they have just seen such a t...

Conceptual short term memory (CSTM) is a theoretical construct that provides one answer to the question of how perceptual and conceptual processes are related. CSTM is a mental buffer and processor in which current perceptual stimuli and their associated concepts from long term memory (LTM) are represented briefly, allowing meaningful patterns or s...

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...

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 prese...

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 th...

Reports an error in "Attention blinks for selection, not perception or memory: Reading sentences and reporting targets" by Mary C. Potter, Brad Wyble and Jennifer Olejarczyk ( Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2011[Dec], Vol 37[6], 1915-1923). The article contained several production-related errors. In Table 1, t...

Three experiments using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) tested participants' ability to detect targets in streams that are in motion. These experiments compared the ability to identify moving versus stationary RSVP targets and examined the attentional blink with pairs of targets that were moving or stationary. One condition presented RSVP s...

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 attention...

Detecting a picture in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) on the basis of a verbal title given just before the sequence (e.g., people in a restaurant) has been shown to be surprisingly easy when pictures are presented for about 100 ms (Potter, 1975). In the present study we presented color photographs of a wide variety of scenes at still hig...

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...

In a typical attentional blink experiment, viewers try to detect two target items among distractors in a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP): processing of the first target impairs participants' ability to recall a subsequent target at short stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). However, little is known about whether target detection interferes w...

Forty distinct scenes of furnished rooms were generated on a computer and three “snapshots” of each room were taken from different viewpoints in a horizontal arc. When a single scene was presented for .5 s followed by a mask and immediately tested for recognition, participants could correctly identify the old (previously viewed) room when presented...

The attentional blink (AB) is a failure to identify the second of two targets presented in a stream of distractors with a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 200-500 ms. While the blinked target is unavailable for report, previous studies suggest that the target is processed to a semantic level. In two experiments we asked whether semantic priming m...

Most people show a remarkable deficit in reporting the second of two targets (T2) when presented 200-500 ms after the first (T1), reflecting an 'attentional blink' (AB). However, there are large individual differences in the magnitude of the effect, with some people, referred to as 'non-blinkers', showing no such attentional restrictions. Here we r...

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...

Potter, Nieuwenstein, & Strohminger (2008) found that there was an attentional blink for report of the second of two red (or uppercase) words at a short SOA, in an RSVP sentence presented for 93 ms per word. If participants simply reported the whole sentence without looking for targets, they had no difficulty including the same two words along with...

In a real-world context, brief glimpses of moving forms, especially people, are both prevalent and salient. Yet in studies of search and selective attention, targets are typically static stimuli, such as characters, words, or pictures. In the present experiments, targets were briefly presented point-light walkers (PLWs), each consisting of a cohere...

When monitoring two RSVP streams of letters for one or two targets indicated by one or two green annulus cues, is attention to two cues independent? Letter streams were presented above and below a fixation cross for 80ms/letter. On a given trial there was one cue, two simultaneous cues, or two cues presented sequentially at 80 ms SOA in the two str...

Objects in a scene are often partially occluded without causing the viewer any problem: the occluded parts are apparently represented via amodel 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 53ms, 107ms, 213ms...

The Attentional Blink (Raymond , Shapiro, & Arnell 1992) is a well known example of the limited capacity of visual encoding. Recently, the phenomenon of sparing has been demonstrated to occur for four or more targets in a row (Nieuwenstein & Potter 2006; Olivers, Van Der Stigchel & Hulleman 2005; Kawahara, Kumada & DiLollo in Press), effectively el...

In studies in which unrelated photographs are presented in RSVP, viewers can readily detect a picture when given a brief descriptive title such as picnic or two men talking, at rates of presentation up to about 10 pictures/s, even though they have never seen that picture before and an infinite number of different pictures could fit the description...

People watching rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of scenes may experience binding errors so that objects from different scenes presented in succession are seen as cooccurring within the same scene (with line drawings, Intraub, 1989; pairs of letters, Bowman & Wyble, 2007; and letters in words, Holcombe & Judson, 2007). One might assume that...

The attentional blink (AB) refers to the finding that observers often miss the second of two masked visual targets (T1 and T2, e.g., letters) appearing within 200-500 ms. Although the presence of a T1 mask is thought to be required for this effect, we recently found that an AB deficit can be observed even in the absence of a T1 mask if T2 is shown...

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 keyb...

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,...

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 consec...

Introduction. People watching rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of scenes may experience binding errors so that objects from different scenes presented in succession are seen as cooccurring within the same scene. Using line drawings, Intraub (1989) found that within an RSVP sequence a target object often migrates to an adjacent scene. Bowman...

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...

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...

An attentional blink occurs when observers are asked to identify two targets embedded in an RSVP sequence of distractors: Performance is severely impaired for second targets that occur within less than 500 ms of the first target. Last year, we reported that this impairment does not occur when observers are asked to report all items in a sequence (N...

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 atte...

When photographs of natural scenes are shown in a rapid serial visual presentation at 6/s, more than half can be recognized if tested immediately, but over the next few seconds of the test many are forgotten (Potter, Staub, Rado, & O'Connor, 2002). When the test consists of titles of the pictures (e.g., “cut up fruit”) performance is similar to tes...

The time course of semantic priming between two associated words was tracked using rapid serial visual presentation of two synchronized streams of stimuli appearing at about 20 items/sec, each stream including a target word. The two words were semantically related or unrelated and were separated by stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 0-213 msec....

At what stage does semantic priming affect accuracy in target search? In two experiments, participants viewed two streams of stimuli, each including a target word among distractors. Stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) between the targets (T1 and T2) ranged from 53 to 213 msec. A word semantically related to one or neither of the targets preceded eac...

Does knowledge about which objects and settings tend to co-occur affect how people interpret an image? The effects of consistency on perception were investigated using manipulated photographs containing a foreground object that was either semantically consistent or inconsistent with its setting. In four experiments, participants reported the foregr...

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 a...

Competition for attention between 2 written words was investigated by presenting the words briefly in a single stream of distractors (Experiment 1) or in different streams (Experiment 2-6), using rapid serial visual presentation at 53 ms/item. Stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was varied from 0 to 213 ms. At all SOAs there was strong competition, but...

When viewing a rapid sequence of pictures, observers momentarily understand the gist of each scene but have poor recognition memory for most of them (M. C. Potter, 1976). Is forgetting immediate, or does some information persist briefly? Sequences of 5 scenes were presented for 173 ms/picture; when yes-no testing began immediately, recognition was...

Competition for attention between 2 written words was investigated by presenting the words briefly in a single stream of distractors (Experiment 1) or in different streams (Experiment 2-6), using rapid serial visual presentation at 53 ms/item. Stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was varied from 0 to 213 ms. At all SOAs there was strong competition, but...

When viewing a rapid sequence of pictures, observers momentarily understand the gist of each scene but have poor recognition memory for most of them (M. C. Potter, 1976). Is forgetting immediate, or does some information persist briefly? Sequences of 5 scenes were presented for 173 ms/picture: when yes-no testing began immediately, recognition was...

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 picture...

The role of phonology in silent Chinese compound-character reading was studied in 2 experiments using a semantic relatedness judgment task. There was significant interference from a homophone of a "target" word that was semantically related to an initially presented cue word whether the homophone was orthographically similar to the target or not. T...

When monitoring a rapid serial visual presentation at 100 ms per item for 2 targets among distractors, viewers have difficulty reporting the 2nd target (T2) when it appears 200-500 ms after the onset of the 1st letter target (T1): an attentional blink (AB; M. M. Chun & M. C. Potter, 1995b; J. E. Raymond, K. L. Shapiro, & K. M. Arnell, 1992). Does t...

In two previous papers (Lombardi & Potter, 1992; Potter & Lombardi, 1990) we reported evidence that immediate recall of a sentence requires regeneration from the message level, rather than from a verbatim representation. However, participants tended to reproduce the surface syntax even when there were two meaning-equivalent surface structures avail...

A new task, double-word selection, simulated lexical ambiguity by presenting 2 words between which the reader had to choose while reading a sentence shown at 133 or 150 ms/word, following a procedure called rapid serial visual presentation. The double-word pair was presented for less than 100 ms. In immediate recall of the sentence, readers made a...

A new task, double-word selection, simulated lexical ambiguity by presenting 2 words between which the reader had to choose while reading a sentence shown at 133 or 150 ms/word, following a procedure called rapid serial visual presentation. The double-word pair was presented for less than 100 ms. In immediate recall of the sentence, readers made a...

When 2 targets are presented among distractors in rapid serial visual presentation, correct identification of the 1st target results in a deficit for a 2nd target appearing within 200-500 ms. This attentional blink (AB; J.E. Raymond, K.L. Shapiro, & K.M. Arnell, 1992) was examined for categorically defined targets (letters among nonletters) in 7 ex...

Short-term memory for conceptual information is largely missing from current models of short-term memory. Several phenomena are discussed that give evidence for very brief conceptual representations of stimuli. Although these fleeting representations do not surface readily with many of the standard methods for studying and testing short-term memory...

When reading lists of words and nonwords at 100 msec/word, Ss reported words accurately but frequently converted nonwords such as dack into similarly spelled words such as duck or deck. In sentences, both nonwords and anomalous words were misread as appropriate words, but the bias was greater for nonwords. Word associations in lists (e.g., sail...

Immediate recall of a sentence is normally highly accurate. Previous work (Potter & Lombardi, 1990) has suggested that this accuracy is not due to a surface (“verbatim”) representation of the string of words, but to regeneration of the sentence from a conceptual representation, using activated lexical entries. The present study tests an extension o...

Repetition blindness (RB) is the inability to detect or recall a repeated word in rapid serial visual presentation. The role of visual versus phonological (name) similarity in RB was examined. RB was found for single letters, whether printed in the same or different cases, and for single digits, whether represented verbally (nine), as arabic numera...

Verbatim short-term memory for a sentence has been taken as evidence for a surface representation different from the conceptual representation characteristic of longer-term memory. In seven experiments we investigated an alternative hypothesis: that immediate recall involves regeneration of the sentence from a conceptual representation, using words...

Repetition blindness (RB) is the failure to detect or recall repetitions of words in rapid serial visual presentation. Experiment 1 showed that synonym pairs are not susceptible to RB. In Experiments 2 and 3, RB was still found when one occurrence of the word was part of a compound noun phrase. In Experiment 4, homonyms produced RB if they were spe...

An abstract is not available.

Repetition blindness (Kanwisher, 1986, 1987) is the failure to detect repetitions of words in lists presented in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). Two questions were investigated in the present study. First, if repetition blindness is not found with auditory presentation, it would support a specifically visual account of the effect. Second,...

Clark (1987) offers a dual coding alternative (Paivio, 1971, 1986) to the conceptual hypothesis that Potter, Kroll, Yachzel, Carpenter, and Sherman (1986) proposed to explain the ease with which people can read and understand rebus sentences in which a picture replaces a noun. We present theoretical and empirical reasons for positing a conceptual r...

Clark (1987) offers a dual coding alternative (Paivio, 1971, 1986) to the conceptual hypothesis that Potter, Kroll, Yachzel, Carpenter, and Sherman (1986) proposed to explain the ease with which people can read and understand rebus sentences in which a picture replaces a noun. We present theoretical and empirical reasons for positing a conceptual r...

To understand a sentence, the meanings of the words in the sentence must be retrieved and combined. Are these meanings represented within the language system (the lexical hypothesis) or are they represented in a general conceptual system that is not restricted to language (the conceptual hypothesis)? To evaluate these hypotheses, sentences were pre...

In 5 experiments with a total of 120 Ss of college age, sentences were presented in which a pictured object replaced a word (rebus sentences). Sentences were shown using rapid serial visual presentation at a rate of 10 or 12 words/second. With one set of materials (Exp I and II), Ss took longer to judge the plausibility of rebus sentences than all-...

When a sentence with more than one clause is processed, words of the first clause become less available for recall or recognition once the clause boundary has been passed. One common interpretation of this observation is that the representation of a given word shifts from a predominantly surface form (e.g., phonological or lexical) to a semantic fo...

Two hypotheses about the association between the equivalent words in a bilingual's two languages are considered. The word association hypothesis proposes that a direct association is established between words in the two languages. During second-language acquisition, that association is used to understand and produce words in the second language by...

A series of five experiments addressed the question of whether pictures and the words that name them access a common conceptual representation. In the first three experiments the processing of words in the lexical decision task was compared with the processing of pictured objects in a formally analogous task which we called the object decision task...

One view of sentence comprehension is that word meanings are retrieved independently and then combined; another view is that the retrieved meanings for words are context dependent and thus different in different sentences. To examine retrieval of a noun's meaning in the context of an adjective, spoken sentences were probed with a picture. Subjects...

To test the hypothesis that the meaning of a sentence is represented in an abstract format rather than one mediated by words or images, 96 spoken sentences were immediately followed by a word or drawing probe. Subjects decided whether or not the probe was related to the meaning of the sentence. Response times to the drawing and word probes did not...

Three converving procedures were used to determine whether pictures presented in a rapid sequence at rates comparable to eye fixations are understood and then quickly forgotten. In two experiments, sequences of 16 color photographs were presented at rates of 113, 167, or 333 msec per picture. In one group, subjects were given an immediate test of r...

Viewers briefly glimpsed pictures presented in a sequence at rates up to eight per second. They recognized a target picture as accurately and almost as rapidly when they knew only its meaning given by a name (for example, a boat) as when they had seen the picture itself in advance.

WHEN an object such as a chair is presented visually, or is represented by a line drawing, a spoken word, or a written word, the initial stages in the process leading to understanding are clearly different in each case. There is disagreement, however, about whether those early stages lead to a common abstract representation in memory, the idea of a...

Examined memory for visual events occurring at and near the rate of eye fixations. In Exp. I, 48 undergraduates were shown 8 films of 16 unrelated pictures presented at 1/2, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, or 8/sec. Later recognition ranged from 93-16%. In Exp. II with 32 Ss, rates were mixed within each sequence to determine whether the probability of recognizing...

A precursor of counting, the ability to point out each member of a set once and only once, was examined in 58 children aged 2½-4 years. Performance was positively correlated with age and with ability to count and was negatively correlated with the number of items (3-9) in the set. The effect of arrangement of items depended in part on their similar...

Pictures of common objects, coming slowly into focus, were viewed by adult observers. Recognition was delayed when subjects first viewed the pictures out of focus. The greater or more prolonged the initial blur, the slower the eventual recognition. Interference may be accounted for partly by the difficulty of rejecting incorrect hypotheses based on...