ON THE RELATIONS AMONG DIFFERENT MEASURES OF VISIBLE AND INFORMATIONAL PERSISTENCE

We report research designed to accomplish two goals. We first consider the question, raised by Coltheart (1980) and others, of whether three measures of visible and informational persistence-performance in temp orally integrating two successively presented stimuli, subjective rati ng of the degree to which two successively presented stimuli appear to constitute a single or a dual temporal event, and partial report perf ormance-all measure the same underlying mental entity. We answer this question using a superset of dissociation logic called state-trace ana lysis (Bamber, 1979), and within the context of a systematic empirical foundation consisting of seven closely related experiments. Our secon d goal is to extend and apply a theory to data acquired from our seven experiments and also to data reported by other investigators. This th eory, which has been confirmed in a variety of paradigms (see Busey & Loftus, 1994) assumes that (1) the initial stages of the visual system act as a low-pass linear filter which operates on a stimulus temporal waveform to produce a sensory response; (2) instantaneous rate of acq uiring information from the stimulus is jointly proportional to sensor y-response magnitude and proportion of as-yet-to-be-acquired stimulus information; (3) partial-report performance is determined by total amo unt of acquired information; (4) the probability that two events are p erceived as contemporaneous is determined by the temporal correlation of their respective information-acquisition rate functions (which is s imilar to a suggestion by Dixon & Di Lollo, 1994): and (5) temporal in tegration is successful to the degree that the two temporal events are perceived as contemporaneous. This theory was highly successful in ac counting for our and other investigators' temporal-integration and com pleteness-rating data, and was moderately successful in accounting for partial-report data. We discuss the degree to which our three persist ence measures can be united within the context of our theory; we comme nt on the distinction between objective and subjective measures of vis ible persistence; and we address the decades-old question: ''What is p ersistence good for? (C) 1998 Academic Press.