Whole report versus partial report in RSVP sentences

• Published in: Journal of memory and language Vol. 58; no. 4; pp. 907 - 915
• Main Authors: Potter, Mary C., Nieuwenstein, Mark, Strohminger, Nina
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: San Diego, CA Elsevier Inc 01.05.2008; Elsevier; Elsevier BV
• Subjects: Attention; Attentional blink; Biological and medical sciences; Cognition & reasoning; Eye Movements; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Information processing; Language; Language Processing; Letter Recognition; Memory; Partial report; Production and perception of written language; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reading Comprehension; Recall; Recall (Psychology); RSVP (rapid serial visual presentation); Sentence memory; Sentence processing; Sentences; Serial Ordering; Syntactic Processing; Target search; Task Analysis; Verbal communication; Visual Processing; Attentional blink; Sentence processing; Partial report; RSVP (rapid serial visual presentation); Target search; Sentence memory; Human; Memory; Cognition; Experimental study; Reading; Rapid serial visual présentation; Language; Visual attention; Sentence
• ISSN: 0749-596X; 1096-0821
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2007.12.002

A sentence is readily understood and recalled when presented one word at a time using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) at 10 words/s [Potter, M. C. (1984). Rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP): A method for studying language processing. In D. Kieras & M. Just (Eds.), New methods in reading comprehension research (pp. 91–118). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.]. In contrast, selecting just two colored letters at 10 letters/s results in easy detection of the first target but poor recall for the second when it appears 200–500 ms later. This attentional blink disappears when all letters must be reported; instead, performance drops more gradually over serial position [Nieuwenstein, M. R., & Potter, M. C. (2006). Temporal limits of selection and memory encoding: A comparison of whole versus partial report in rapid serial visual presentation. Psychological Science, 17, 471–475.]. Would target words in sentences escape an attentional blink? Subjects either reported two target words (in red or uppercase) or the whole 10-word sentence. There was a blink for Target 2 in partial report, but that target was easily remembered in whole report. With scrambled sentences whole report dropped but partial report was unaffected, again showing a blink. The attentional blink is not due to memory processing of Target 1, but to target selection, which is incompatible with sentence processing.