Direct Measures of Short-Term Visual Storage

Two experiments, involving seven conditions, explored the use of direct measures of visual persistence. In each, the subject was asked to judge if an intermittent stimulus appeared perceptually continuous, or whether it completely faded before the next presentation occurred. The first experiment showed that visual persistence was set at approximately 250 msec. for a recycling presentation of a circle in a tachistoscope; in another task employing a moving opaque slit passing back and forth over a circle, persistence times averaged 50 msec. longer. Reducing luminance by 2 log units increased persistence only slightly, though removing the adapting field increased it by over 100 msec. The second experiment, using the repeating circle, varied the duration of the stimulus, and compared monoptic with dichoptic presentations. Visual persistence was found to be independent of stimulus duration over a range of 4 to 200 msec., where all durations were above recognition threshold for the stimulus. Persistence was unaffected whether the stimulus was repeatedly presented in the same eye or alternated between eyes, strongly suggesting that the storage is central. Finally, a re-analysis of Dodwell and Engel's paper on stereopsis suggests that their effects can be adequately explained by visual persistence of the asynchronous stereo pairs, rather than a more complex fusion model. All of these results strongly support the use of visual persistence as a direct measure of short-term visual storage.

[1]  George Sperling,et al.  The information available in brief visual presentations. , 1960 .

[2]  F Smith,et al.  Temporal factors in visual information processing. , 1966, Canadian journal of psychology.

[3]  R. Efron.  STEREOSCOPIC VISION I. EFFECT OF BINOCULAR TEMPORAL SUMMATION* , 1957, The British journal of ophthalmology.

[4]  D. Kahneman,et al.  Critical duration for the resolution of form: centrally or peripherally determined? , 1967, Journal of experimental psychology.

[5]  P. Dodwell,et al.  Dark adaptation and the Pulfrich effect , 1968 .

[6]  Continuity of exposure length effects in tachistoscopic perception , 1967 .

[7]  J. F. Mackworth.  The duration of the visual image. , 1963 .

[8]  H. Barlow.  Temporal and spatial summation in human vision at different background intensities , 1958, The Journal of physiology.

[9]  C W Eriksen,et al.  Some temporal characteristics of visual pattern perception. , 1967, Journal of experimental psychology.

[10]  B. Julesz.  TEXTURE AND VISUAL PERCEPTION. , 1965, Scientific American.

[11]  S. H. Bartley.  Vision. A Study of its Basis , 1943 .

[12]  T. Parks.  POST-RETINAL VISUAL STORAGE. , 1965, The American journal of psychology.

[13]  P. C. DODWELL,et al.  A Theory of Binocular Fusion , 1963, Nature.

[14]  William G. Chase,et al.  Short-term visual storage , 1967 .

[15]  E. Averbach,et al.  Short-term memory in vision , 1961 .

[16]  T. Natsoulas.  What are perceptual reports about? , 1967, Psychological bulletin.

[17]  G. Sperling,et al.  Successive approximations to a model for short term memory. , 1967, Acta psychologica.

[18]  Ralph Norman Haber,et al.  Post-retinal storage? Some further observations on Parks’ camel as seen through the eye of a needle , 1968 .