title: Is there brief temporal buffering of successive visual inputs?
abstract: The part-report advantage has been used to identify short-lived forms of visual storage (Sperling, 1960). We adopt the part-report paradigm to test whether visual memory can preserve, for a brief time, successive inputs and their temporal order. In our experiments, two successive arrays, each of 4 digits, were presented on each trial. The two arrays were spatially coincident, and each was followed by a random pattern-mask. In the part-report conditions, an auditory cue indicated whether the participant should report the first array or the second array. The results consistently showed a part-report advantage, which ranged in size from 16% to 37%. Delaying the cue by 500 ms abolished most of this advantage, in that performance was then similar to that in whole-report conditions. Subsequent experiments confirmed that the part-report superiority we measure is not achieved by (a) making eye movements that spatially displace the second array relative to the first; (b) extracting information from a single snapshot containing an integrated representation of the targets and masks; or (c) transferring a subset of material to a phonological store. We propose instead that observers have access to a limited, rapidly decaying representation of successive visual inputs stored in temporal sequence.
authors.affiliation: Durham University, Durham, UK. waynestuartsmith@hotmail.com
authors.forename: Wayne S
authors.initials: WS
authors.lastname: Smith
authors.forename: J D
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Mollon
authors.forename: Rishi
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Bhardwaj
authors.forename: Hannah E
authors.initials: HE
authors.lastname: Smithson
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D013997:Time Factors