Some Phenomena of the Persistence of Vision

Allen, Frank

doi:10.1103/physrevseriesi.28.45

Cited by 11 publications

(15 citation statements)

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“…Greene (2007a) examined shape recognition with very brief LED flashes, but also included a For all respondents the probability of successful recognition of letters increased monotonically as the radiant intensity of flashes was increased direct measure of the duration of visibility with a task that was inspired by Newton (1730Newton ( /1952, with initial experimental results provided by D'Arcy (1765, reported by Allen, 1926). The task flashed successive pairs of dots comprising two columns of an LED array, each pair being displayed for 100 μs, followed with some delay after flash offset by activation of the next pair.…”

Section: Perceptual Mechanisms -Visible Persistencementioning

confidence: 99%

Recognition of letters displayed as briefly flashed dot patterns

Greene

Visani

2015

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Complex shapes can be identified (named) when only the outer boundary of the shape is represented by discrete dots and with the dots being displayed for a duration lasting only a few microseconds (μs). This line of work is extended here to include recognition of letters with 10 μs flashes as a means to study visible persistence and information persistence. The first two studies were designed to assess visible persistence. Models were derived that quantified how recognition changed as a function of flash intensity. Then each letter was displayed twice, each at a near-threshold level of intensity and varying the interval between flashes. The second flash was able to boost the influence of the first flash for about 100 ms. This corresponds to the duration that a brief flash will remain visible, so these conditions likely were producing visible persistence. Information persistence was studied by manipulating dot density of the letter patterns. Recognition declined as the density of dots in each letter pattern was reduced. When two complimentary low-density samples were flashed, there was summation of their influence that declined to an asymptote in about 200 ms, and then remained above the one-flash control out to the maximum test interval of 1 s. The summation of high-salience, low-density dot patterns over such a long interval likely reflects both iconic memory persistence and access to working memory.

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Section: Perceptual Mechanisms -Visible Persistencementioning

confidence: 99%

Recognition of letters displayed as briefly flashed dot patterns

Greene

Visani

2015

Atten Percept Psychophys

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“…This requires counting a large number of closely spaced lines, where both the spacing and the number make counting impractical. Alternatively, the classical procedure (Newton, 1720;Allen, 1926) for estimating persistence of an object in real motion (revived by Burr, 1980) utilizes the length of the object's blur streak to estimate visual persistence, While it avoids the counting problem, this method still requires the subject to estimate the size of a rapidly moving object.…”

Section: Paradigms For Estimating the Duration Of Visible Persistencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…For some spatial and temporal separations of the line in stroboscopic motion, instead of a single line, observers perceive a number of lines moving together across the screen (Allport, 1968). An analogous phenomenon in real motion is the apparent elongation of a rapidly moving object (Newton, 1720;Allen, 1926 stroboscopic motion and the smearing in real motion is that each flash of the line produces an image whose visibility persists over time and which, therefore, temporally overlaps subsequent flashes of the line.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The visible persistence of stimuli in stroboscopic motion

1990

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Abstract-This paper reports an improved paradigm to measure visible persistence. The stimulus is a pair of lines stroboscopically displayed in successive positions moving in opposite directions. The subjects' judgement of simultaneous appearance of all the presented lines is used to estimate visible persistence. This paradigm permitted independent manipulation of spatial and temporal stimulus separations in linear motion. The resulting estimates of visible persistence increase with spatial separation up to 0.24 deg of visual angle and approaches a maximum value at larger spatial separations. The results are consistent with the existence of a hypothetical visual gain mechanism that operates over small retinal distances to effectively decrease persistence duration with decreasing spatial separation.

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“…reportedly contain the first known reference to this phenomenon (Allen, 1926). The fairly recent rekindling of interest in visual persistence can, perhaps, be traced to the work of Sperling (1960).…”

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Stimulus duration and partial report performance

Yeomans

Irwin

1985

Perception & Psychophysics

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This paper investigates the effect of stimulus duration on partial report performance. Two experiments showed that variations in stimulus duration from 50 to 500 msec had little or no effect on partial report accuracy, decay, or error patterns. These results contrast with previous research demonstrating that increasing stimulus duration decreases visible persistence duration. Our findings thus provide support for the argument (Coltheart, 1980) that informational persistence (knowledge about the visual properties of a stimulus) is a separate phenomenon from visible persistence (the phenomenal persistence of a stimulus), and suggest that the traditional view of iconic memory, which conflates these two forms of persistence, is incorrect. Furthermore, our results indicate that informational persistence is not merely a function of unnaturally brief stimulus exposures, but exists even after exposure durations as long as 500 msec. Possible mechanisms of informational persistence, as well as its potential role in everyday perception, are discussed.It has been known for centuries that visual sensation persists after stimulus offset; the writings of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) reportedly contain the first known reference to this phenomenon (Allen, 1926). The fairly recent rekindling of interest in visual persistence can, perhaps, be traced to the work of Sperling (1960). Sperling briefly presented subjects an array of letters and, following their offset, cued report of one row of the array. Sperling found that subjects' recall performance for the cued row was very high if the cue was presented within about 100 msec or so of stimulus offset. Furthermore, recall accuracy decreased as the time between stimulus offset and presentation of the recall cue increased. These results stood in contrast with what happened when subjects were asked to report the entire array of letters. In this case, recall performance was limited to only a few items from the array. Taken together, these results suggested that immediately following stimulus offset there was more information available about the array than could be normally reported, but this information disappeared quickly with the passage of time. This method of sampling a subset of the total information in an array has been called the partial-report technique, and the superior recall performance under these conditions, the partial-report superiority effect.

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Some Phenomena of the Persistence of Vision

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

Recognition of letters displayed as briefly flashed dot patterns

Recognition of letters displayed as briefly flashed dot patterns

The visible persistence of stimuli in stroboscopic motion

Stimulus duration and partial report performance

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