scholarly journals The role of meaning in visual working memory: Real-world objects, but not simple features, benefit from deeper processing.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy F. Brady ◽  
Viola S. Störmer
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Visual Working Memory ◽  
Real World ◽  
Simple Features

scholarly journals The role of meaning in visual working memory: Real-world objects, but not simple features, benefit from deeper processing

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (9) ◽  
pp. 2644
Author(s):  
Viola Stoermer ◽  
Timothy Brady
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Visual Working Memory ◽  
Real World ◽  
Simple Features

scholarly journals The role of meaning in visual working memory: Real-world objects, but not simple features, benefit from deeper processing

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy F. Brady ◽  
Viola S. Störmer
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Visual Working Memory ◽  
Real World ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Working Memory Capacity ◽  
Depth Processing ◽  
Single Feature ◽  
High Level ◽  
Simple Features ◽  
Meaningful Stimuli

Visual working memory is a capacity-limited cognitive system used to actively store and manipulate visual information. Visual working memory capacity is not fixed, but varies by stimulus type: stimuli that are more meaningful are better remembered. In the current work, we investigate what conditions lead to the strongest benefits for meaningful stimuli. We propose that in some situations, participants may be prone to try to encode the entire display holistically (i.e., in a quick ‘snapshot’), encouraging participants to treat objects simply as meaningless colored ‘blobs’, rather than processing them individually and in a high-level way, which could reduce benefits for meaningful stimuli. In a series of experiments we directly test whether real-world objects, colors, perceptually-matched less-meaningful objects, and fully scrambled objects benefit from deeper processing. We systematically vary the presentation format of stimuli at encoding to be either simultaneous — encouraging a parallel, ‘take-a-quick-snapshot’ strategy — or present the stimuli sequentially, promoting a serial, each-item-at-once strategy. We find large advantages for meaningful objects in all conditions, but find that real-world objects — and to a lesser degree lightly scrambled, still meaningful versions of the objects — benefit from the sequential encoding and thus deeper, focused-on-individual-items processing, while colors do not. Our results suggest single feature objects may be an outlier in their affordance of parallel, quick processing, and that in more realistic memory situations, visual working memory likely relies upon representations resulting from in-depth processing of objects (e.g., in higher-level visual areas) rather than solely being represented in terms of their low-level features.

Further studies on the role of attention and stimulus repetition in item–item binding processes in visual working memory.

2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dwight J. Peterson ◽  
Reed Decker ◽  
Moshe Naveh-Benjamin
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Visual Working Memory ◽  
Stimulus Repetition ◽  
Item Item

The role of attention in item-item binding in visual working memory.

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (9) ◽  
pp. 1403-1414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dwight J. Peterson ◽  
Moshe Naveh-Benjamin
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Visual Working Memory ◽  
Item Item

The role of the motor system in visual working memory: Further findings

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-162
Author(s):  
Clara Gimenez ◽  
◽  
Denis Brouillet ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Visual Working Memory ◽  
Motor System

Aging and guided visual search: the role of visual working memory

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-549 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sowon Hahn ◽  
Daniel R. Buttaccio
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Visual Search ◽  
Visual Working Memory

scholarly journals Scaling up visual attention and visual working memory to the real world

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy F. Brady ◽  
Viola S. Störmer ◽  
Anna Shafer-Skelton ◽  
Jamal Rodgers Williams ◽  
Angus F. Chapman ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Visual Attention ◽  
Visual Working Memory ◽  
Real World ◽  
Scaling Up ◽  
The Real ◽  
Vision Science ◽  
Precise Understanding ◽  
Complex Settings ◽  
And Control

Both visual attention and visual working memory tend to be studied with very simple stimuli and low-level paradigms, designed to allow us to understand the representations and processes in detail, or with fully realistic stimuli that make such precise understanding difficult but are more representative of the real world. In this chapter we argue for an intermediate approach in which visual attention and visual working memory are studied by scaling up from the simplest settings to more complex settings that capture some aspects of the complexity of the real-world, while still remaining in the realm of well-controlled stimuli and well-understood tasks. We believe this approach, which we have been taking in our labs, will allow a more generalizable set of knowledge about visual attention and visual working memory while maintaining the rigor and control that is typical of vision science and psychophysics studies.

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