The Amount Seen in Brief Exposures

Abstract

The experiments reported are a series of attempts to test the consequences of assuming that a subject exposed to briefly presented tachistoscopic information does not have access to a visual image. The partial report procedure is examined under several conditions with the letter row cues immediately following stimulus exposure, and at different levels of cue delay.

The results of eye movement monitoring, and of instructing subjects where to look, agree with the guessing data of a previous experiment in showing a sharp decline in the number of letters correctly reported when the subject is looking at the wrong row, in conformity with the anticipative selection hypothesis. The result of varying the subject's uncertainty about what is to be reported is to vary the slope of the delay curve; with the implication that inefficient strategies of rehearsal, rather than visual image decay, are responsible for the reported delay effects.