Failure to detect meaning in RSVP at 27 ms per picture

Abstract

The human visual system has the remarkable ability to rapidly detect meaning from visual stimuli. Potter, Wyble, Hagmann, and McCourt (Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 76, 270-279, 2014) tested the minimum viewing time required to obtain meaning from a stream of pictures shown in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) sequence containing either six or 12 pictures. They reported that observers could detect the presence of a target picture specified by name (e.g., smiling couple) even when the pictures in the sequence were presented for just 13 ms each. Potter et al. claimed that this was insufficient time for feedback processing to occur, so feedforward processing alone must be able to generate conscious awareness of the target pictures. A potential confound in their study is that the pictures in the RSVP sequence sometime contained areas with no high-contrast edges, and so may not have adequately masked each other. Consequently, iconic memories of portions of the target pictures may have persisted in the visual system, thereby increasing the effective presentation time. Our study addressed this issue by redoing the Potter et al. study, but using four different types of masks. We found that when adequate masking was used, no evidence emerged that observers could detect the presence of a specific target picture, even when each picture in the RSVP sequence was presented for 27 ms. On the basis of these findings, we cannot rule out the possibility that feedback processing is necessary for individual pictures to be recognized.

Speed of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation of Pictures, Numbers and Words Affects Event-Related Potential-Based Detection Accuracy

“…Lamme and Roelfsema [35] suggest response latencies at each hierarchical level of the visual system are approximately 10ms. Therefore supposing a minimum of five levels must be navigated as activity transmits from V1 to higher cortical areas along with reentrant loops, this is unlikely to occur in less than 50ms [36] [37]. Thus, RSVP processing frequency has a theoretical maximum of approximately 20Hz.…”

Making Sense of Real-World Scenes

“…Studies typically make use of backwards-masking, or rapid serial visual presentation of, scene images and record performance as a function of presentation duration (note that this does not necessarily reflect the timing of relevant brain processes [5]). A large body of work suggests that as little as a ~13ms presentation duration allows for an initial scene percept [6], potentially including conceptual meaning [e.g., 7] [but see, 8]. Though this duration by itself has limited ecological validity compared to the gradually changing, predictable world we experience, it serves as an important demonstration that an initial conceptual representation of a scene requires only a small subset of available visual properties to be processed.…”

All-or-none visual categorization in the human brain

“…In our experiment, missed face categorizations occurred more often at shorter presentation durations, and even up to SOAs of 50 ms (20 Hz; Figure 2). At each face presentation, whether or not the image is categorized or not likely depends on many factors, including: properties of the face image (e.g., how central or high-contrast the face is, or the face’s head orientation), the overlap of low-level properties with its flanking images (Crouzet & Thorpe, 2011; see again Potter, 2012; but also Maguire & Howe, 2016; Broers et al, 2018), the local context (e.g., whether the preceding face has been categorized), and the neural representation of faces in the stimulated brain.…”