Evidence of a rapid matching process for simultaneous reading of several items from visual information storage

When subjects searched for a digit which did not appear in an array of nine different, briefly displayed digits, they identified them more rapidly than Sperling reported earlier could be done. Subjects stated they could "see" the missing digit. We hypothesized that the "seen" digit would be the only remaining digit after subjects matched an internal set of 10 digits with the displayed set of nine stimuli. This process works early as sensory information storage and facilitates character identification. Here we presented another stimulus array immediately after the first one to examine the matching process by extinguishing the visualized digit. When the two arrays had different missing digits (Condition-D), identification of the missing digit from the first array was worse than when they were the same (Condition-S). For the former condition, the remaining digit was extinguished after it was actually presented in the second array. The results support subjects' self-reports and clarify the matching process in the early information-processing stage.