RSVP and Masked Priming Research

Repetition Blindness and the Attentional Blink

Research on repetition blindness and the attentional blink use a technique called rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). RSVP involves the presentation of stimuli (e.g., letter, pictures or words) sequentially in the same spatial location for about 100ms each.

Repetition blindness refers to a deficit in detecting and reporting both occurrences of a repeated item when the repetition occurs within 500ms of the first occurrence. The attentional blink refers to a difficulty observers have in detecting two unrelated targets in a sequence of distractors and this difficulty is likewise transient. Despite their similarity, the attentional blink and repetition blindness are assumed to arise at different processing stages.

This research aims to uncover further information about the cognitive processes underlying these phenomena. Studying these effects can reveal early stages of visual information processing and storage because the difficulties described do not occur with longer exposure durations (>200 ms).

Current research questions are:

• how do we comprehend and remember briefly presented sequences of visual stimuli, such as single letters, words, pictures of objects and faces.
• how is information presented at rates of 8-10 items per second registered in memory for report?
• how do the processes differ from those available to encode information in short-term memory?

For further information, contact Associate Professor Veronika Coltheart.

Readings:
Dux, P.E., & Coltheart, V. (2005). The meaning of the mask matters: evidence of conceptual interference in the attentional blink. Psychological Science, 16(10), 775-779.
Coltheart, V., Mondy, S., Dux, P.E., & Stephenson, L. (2004). Effects of orthographic and phonological word length on memory for lists shown at RSVP and STM rates. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, 30, 815-826.
Coltheart, V., & Langdon, R. (2003). Repetition blindness for Words yet Repetition Advantage for Nonwords. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 29, 171-185.
Coltheart, V. (Ed.). (1999). Fleeting Memories: Cognition of brief visual stimuli. Cambridge: Mass.:MIT Press.

Masked Priming

Masked priming is the facilitation in the time it takes a reader to respond to a target word that is preceded by a prime, where the prime is presented so briefly that they are not consciously available to the reader.

This research aims to determine what types of similarity between primes and targets are able to make people faster at responding to a word after having been shown the briefly presented prime. For example, one type of masked priming is repetition priming, if you are shown the prime WINDOW, you are faster in responding to the target WINDOW even though you are not consciously aware of the being shown the prime.

Masked onset priming involves presenting a prime with the same first letter to a subsequent word to be read aloud. For example, the prime might be SANK and the target is SLIP. Whether masked onset priming can consistently produce priming is a current research focus.

For further information, contact Associate Professor Sachiko Kinoshita.

Readings:
Kinoshita, S., & Lupker, S. (Eds.). (2003). Masked Priming: The State of the Art. New York: Psychology Press.
Kinoshita, S. (2000). The left-to-right nature of the masked onset priming effect in naming. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 7, 133-141.