Figure 1

Schematic illustrations of the RSVP sequences in the (a) Picture experiment (pictures for the critical and irrelevant items were chosen from Wang’s53 study, and a written permission to use the object contour pictures shown here has been granted by Chinese Journal of Psychology) (b) Word-General experiment/one-character word condition (c) Word-General experiment/two-character word condition, and (d) Pictograph-Sentence experiment. IR stands for irrelevant item, C1 for the first critical item, and C2 for the second critical item. For each experiment, the relationship between C1 and C2 could be identical, semantically related (synonymous in some cases), or unrelated.