Short-term visual storage

The delay between the offset of a briefly exposed array of letters and digits and the onset of an arrow pointing at one of the array positions was varied from 0 to 5000 msec. In addition, the luminance of the stimulus array was varied over three levels. The Ss reported the item in the position indicated by the arrow. Luminance, delay, and the luminance by delay interaction were all significant I Performance monotonically decreased from a delay of 0 msec to a delay of 250 msec, but the percent correct remained fairly constant from 250 msec to 5000 msec. With delays shorter than 250 msec, high luminance arrays showed better performance.