Abstract
Very-short-term visual memory has often been measured with partial report, which uses attentional cues to measure performance as a function of cue delay. The resulting cue-delay effect is often accounted for by a limited ability to transfer information between a high-capacity and a low-capacity store. According to this transfer hypothesis, the performance measured in a typical partial report experiment results from a mixture of two components: information about the tested stimuli is transferred both before and after the cue. In the present experiment, the two components were isolated as follows. Observers attended and memorized a particular object in a multiple-object display. This display was followed by an auditory cue that indicated which of the stimuli would be tested. The critical comparison was between a stay condition, in which the auditory cue indicated the already attended object, and a switch condition, in which the auditory cue indicated a different object. The stay versus switch manipulation had a large effect. The stay condition had little cue-delay effect, whereas the switch condition yielded the usual cue-delay effect. This difference demonstrates the existence of multiple components in the processing and/or memory underlying partial report experiments.
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I thank Cynthia Ames, Corlene Ankrum, Beth Kerr, Geoff Loftus, Ray Slettevold, Penny Yee, and Zelda Zabinsky. This work was supported in part by a grant from the Graduate School of the University of Washington (PHS RR-07096).
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Palmer, J. Isolating the components of very-short-term visual memory. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 29, 399–402 (1991). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333953
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333953