Temporal limitations of visual attention for order perception

The relative order of a letter sequence is difficult to recognize when it is presented repeatedly than when it is presented only once in a rapid serial visual presentation (Holcombe, Kanwisher, & Triesman, 2001). In the present study, we investigated a critical factor that causes this order deficit. Experiment 1 demonstrated that repeating a letter sequence in a short time period induced the order deficit. The robust order deficit did not recover even when the letter sequence included a salient item that attracted exogenous attention. Experiment 2 showed that attending to a briefly presented letter triggered the order deficit for a letter sequence presented within 500 ms after the preceding letter. These results suggest that the order deficit is caused by the temporal limits of visual attention that prevent order information from being consolidated into visual working memory.