Memory operations in rapid serial visual presentation

Short-term memory (STM) has often been considered to be a central resource in cognition. This study addresses its role in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) tasks tapping into temporal attention-the attentional blink (AB). Various STM operations are tested for their impact on performance and, in particular, on the AB. Memory tasks were found to exert considerable impact on general performance but the size of the AB was more or less immune to manipulations of STM load. Likewise, the AB was unaffected by manipulating the match between items held in STM and targets or temporally close distractors in the RSVP stream. The emerging picture is that STM resources, or their lack, play no role in the AB. Alternative accounts assuming serial consolidation, selection for action, and distractor-induced task-set interference are discussed.

The spatial impact of visual distractors on saccade latency

Remote transient changes in the environment, such as the onset of visual distractors, impact on the exe- cution of target directed saccadic eye movements. Studies that have examined the latency of the saccade response have shown conflicting results. When there was an element of target selection, saccade latency increased as the distance between distractor and target increased. In contrast, when target selection is minimized by restricting the target to appear on one axis position, latency has been found to be slowest when the distractor is shown at fixation and reduces as it moves away from this position, rather than from the target. Here we report four experiments examining saccade latency as target and distractor posi- tions are varied. We find support for both a dependence of saccade latency on distractor distance from target and from fixation: saccade latency was longer when distractor is shown close to fixation and even longer still when shown in an opposite location (180°) to the target. We suggest that this is due to inhib- itory interactions between the distractor, fixation and the target interfering with fixation disengagement and target selection.