Principal Investigator Mary Potter
When told what to look for, viewers can detect a picture of "a picnic" or "a woman on the phone" within a rapid sequence of pictures, although afterwards they cannot remember most of the pictures they have just seen. In recent work we have found, however, that memory for rapidly presented pictures does persist briefly, consistent with the idea that there is a conceptual short-term memory (CSTM) for meaningful material. A question we are currently studying is whether this brief picture memory is primarily visual or primarily conceptual -- do we just remember that we saw "a picnic," or do we remember the colors and spatial layout of the picture as well? In other studies we have found that people can detect a target picture within rapid sequences where up to four pictures are presented on a frame, but they consolidate memory for pictures presented in such sequences more slowly, one at a time.