Detecting and Remembering Briefly Presented Pictures
Mary C. Potter · The MIT Press eBooks · 2014
This chapter proposes that conceptual information is extracted early in the visual process and forms what people remember later. By examining continual shifts of fixation by using rapid series visual sequences of unrelated pictures, the discussion shows that initial memory for a briefly presented picture is relatively accurate but declines slowly as time goes by. When unrelated pictures are presented in a continuous sequence at rates in the range of eye fixations, the memory for pictures is poor, suggesting that one glimpse is not sufficient for later memory. In contrast, pictures viewed for 1 to 10 seconds are more easily remembered. Accurate visual information may be important for maintaining scene representations from one thing to another but conceptual memory appears to be the basis for long-term knowledge.