Conceptual Short-Term Memory (CSTM)

The lab's work also encompasses other questions about perception, attention, memory, and language processing, including repetition blindness, the creative misperception of a nonword as influenced by semantic context, cross-modal (visual-auditory) processing of sentences, and the conceptual basis of "verbatim" recall of sentences. For example, the lab has shown that a 14-word sentence can be understood and remembered when presented as rapidly as 12 words per second. In contrast, a sequence of unrelated words (even if no more than 4 or 5 words long) is much more difficult to process and few words are remembered.

These studies contribute to our understanding of how a stimulus such as a word, sentence, or picture quickly generates an interpretation and a fleeting or stable memory. They flesh out the evidence that, early in processing, multiple associations are briefly activated and used selectively to generate a stable interpretation of ongoing experience. There is rapid forgetting of irrelevant associations and of stimuli that do not fit the best interpretation (the viewer may not even become conscious of a stimulus unless it fits with the interpretation). We have termed this process conceptual short term memory (CSTM).