A MODEL FOR CONCEPTUAL PROCESSING OF NATURALISTIC SCENES

Are there fundamental differences in the way in which a list of pictur es and a list of words are processed? We report three experiments that examine serial position effects for rapidly-presented naturalistic sc enes. The experiments provide a basis for comparison with the U-shaped serial position curve and list-length effect which typically result f rom verbal learning experiments. In contrast to the U-shaped verbal se rial position function, our results show a flat function at the beginn ing serial positions and a recency effect which is small and limited t o the last serial position. There is a set-size effect. Results sugges t that the processing leading to a memory representation for visual st imuli such as pictures and linguistic stimuli such as words is qualita tively dissimilar. The findings can be accounted for by a serial proce ssing model whose main parameter is the probability that the subject w ill switch attention from one picture to the next.