Fleeting Memories: Cognition of Brief Visual Stimuli, edited by Veronika Coltheart

MIT Press, 1999. $35.00 (271 pages) ISBN 0 262 03261 9The opening of the TV series Startrek with the line ‘Space: the final frontier’, may say something about frontiers of technology but it does not do justice to the frontiers cognitive science is facing. Research on how space is perceived, represented, and acted upon has in fact been booming over the last 30 years. By contrast, research on how humans deal with the inherent timeliness of the world has been struggling along. Thus, for cognitive science, it might be more appropriate to say ‘Time: the final frontier.’ This final frontier persists in spite of very promising research in masking phenomena that aimed to get at the core of ongoing visual processing1xVisual Masking: an Integrative Approach. Breitmeyer, B.G. See all References. The strength, and weakness, of using masking to study visual perception is that it is primarily a visual phenomenon (rather than a cognitive phenomenon), yet non-visual, cognitive factors affect visual perception. Thus, masking is useful to study visual processing, but not necessarily visual perception.The time frontier has been pushed forward more recently, and several excited settlers have arrived on the back of three phenomena that were discovered within the last 15 years: repetition blindness (RB), the attentional blink2xThe attentional blink. Shapiro, K.L. et al. Trends Cognit. Sci. 1997; 1: 291–296Abstract | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (352)See all References (AB), and change blindness3xChange blindness. Simons, D.J. and Levin, D.T. Trends Cognit. Sci. 1997; 1: 261–267Abstract | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (691)See all References (CB). RB is the inability to detect a second identical item within a rapid stream of visual stimuli (‘rapid’ meaning about nine items per second); AB refers to the poor performance of detecting a second (different) item slightly after another item has been detected in a rapid stream (in this instance the name for an explanation is used also to denote the phenomenon); and CB is the inability to detect changes in a scene when visual transients are introduced. All of these phenomena include visual masking, but go distinctly beyond it. With many new players running into the field and nothing to guide them, it is a great relief to find a collection of essays that provides a map by explicitly addressing the temporal nature of visual cognition. Given the prevailing scarcity of such collections, this book becomes an important item on the shelf of any researcher who needs to know about the short-timescale effects of visual cognition. The eight main essays, together with an introduction and a conclusion by the editor cannot be expected to cover this field fully, but rather to provide a snapshot of a field that is increasingly being recognized as an important, albeit very difficult, endeavor.Two approaches are conceivable for a project of this kind: one is a complete but hop-scotch potpourri of ‘what is out there’, the other one a selection of essays centered on a coherent theme. This book is very much the latter, with all the essays revolving around the same thesis: this is that during normal visual processing, conceptual information is extracted very rapidly from a visual stimulus, and unless attention is directed to that stimulus, the conceptual information is lost as new stimuli are processed. The term ‘fleeting memory’, which serves as the title for the book, is used to denote both conceptual and transient aspects of this processing.The strength of this single thesis approach is that the same conclusion is supported from many different angles, providing a cumulative argument for the thesis. A second strength is that a lot of nomenclature overlaps, so that each chapter read helps in reading subsequent chapters. But the disadvantage of this approach is that it may mislead the reader into thinking that there is a definite answer about the core questions in rapid visual processing. To be sure, the disagreement is not whether conceptual short-term memory exists, but rather to what extent it actually matters. Moreover, at some points, the chapters become repetitive, differing in nuances that at times require a lot of work to discover (e.g. the chapter by Kanwisher, Yin and Wojciulik – Chapter 6, and that by Bavelier – Chapter 7).After the introduction, the book begins with three excellent reviews, by Mary Potter, Helene Intraub and Jeremy Wolfe, respectively. Potter addresses primarily word and sentence recognition, a theme that is picked up later in the book by Bavelier and Coltheart in two further chapters. Intraub focuses on scene understanding, a theme that is elaborated by Kanwisher et al. in chapter 6. Wolfe discusses visual search effects on AB or, rather, what he terms ‘inattentional amnesia’. Several chapters focus on the key phenomena: a very clear chapter on AB (Chapter 5; Shapiro and Luck), and two on RB (Chapters 6 and 7; Kanwisher et al. and Bavelier), both more terse than seems necessary. It is a shame that the two RB chapters consistently use tables to represent their results, rather than pictures – the risk of confining tabular results to fleeting memories is high indeed! Curiously absent from this collection are some of the settlers in the new frontier that have made CB very popular: Simons, Grimes, Rensink, O’Regan, to name but a few (but see Simons and Levin, Ref. 3xChange blindness. Simons, D.J. and Levin, D.T. Trends Cognit. Sci. 1997; 1: 261–267Abstract | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (691)See all ReferencesRef. 3).With my personal interest in neuroscience, I was particularly delighted to see that three chapters address, at least in part, how the brain may deal with ‘fleeting memories’ (Shapiro and Luck, Bavelier, and Saffran and Martin). All three chapters use ERP or lesion studies to support the idea that conceptual information is processed in AB and RB, rather than proposing specific brain areas that might be loci for these effects. A lot of work is waiting to be done in this area.In summary, while this book may not fundamentally change the nature of time as a difficult frontier, it should prove to be an important rallying point for all those willing to cross that frontier. It is likely to appeal to the advanced graduate student and the established researcher both as a good introduction, and as a solid reference.