Running head: REPRESENTATION OF GLIMPSED PICTURES Pictorial and Conceptual Representation of Glimpsed Pictures

Pictures presented in a rapid sequence are remembered briefly, but most are forgotten within a few seconds (Potter, M. C., Staub, A., Rado, J., & O'Connor, D. H., 2002). The present study investigated the pictorial and conceptual components of this fleeting memory by presenting 5 pictured scenes and immediately testing recognition of verbal titles (e.g., "people at a table") or recognition of the pictures themselves, among distractors. Titles were about 80% as effective as pictures in cueing picture memory overall. Both picture recognition and title recognition declined significantly during testing, but initial performance was higher and the decline was steeper when the test stimuli were pictures. In a final experiment using only pictures in the test, 20% of the positive test pictures were replaced by distractors ("decoys") that were conceptually similar to the original picture. False yeses to decoys were significantly higher than to other distractors, but lower than true yeses to old pictures, particularly at the beginning of the test. These results indicate that fleeting memory for glimpsed pictures has a strong conceptual component (conceptual short term memory, CSTM), but show that at the beginning of testing (immediately after viewing 5 pictures) there is additional pictorial memory (pictorial short term memory, PSTM) that is highly volatile and that is not tapped by a gist title or decoy picture.