Mary C. Potter, Professor of Psychology Emerita in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences will present “Detecting picture meaning in extreme conditions” in the Cognitive Brown Bag Wednesday at noon in Tobin 521B. An abstract follows.

Abstract. Potter, Wyble, Hagmann, & McCourt (2014) reported that a new pictured scene in an RSVP sequence can be understood (matched to a name) with durations as brief as 13 ms/picture. Although  d’ increased as duration increased from 13 ms to 27, 53, and 80 ms/picture and was higher when the name was given before than after the sequence, it was above chance at all durations, whether the name came before or after the sequence. I will describe this and subsequent research that replicated and extended those results, including recent studies using spoken vs. written names, with very tight timing between the onset of the name and the onset of the RSVP pictures. Whether these results indicate feedforward processing (as we suggest) or are accounted for in some other way, they represent a challenge to models of visual attention and perception.