scholarly journals Little Support for Discrete Item Limits in Visual Working Memory

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Oberauer
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Young Adults ◽  
Visual Working Memory ◽  
Visual Features ◽  
Original Experiment ◽  
Response Error ◽  
The Third ◽  
Error Distributions ◽  
Modelling Data ◽  
Variable Quality

Some theorists argue that working memory is limited to a discrete number of items, and additional items are not encoded at all. Others assume that all items are represented with variable quality. Adam, Vogel, and Awh (2017) presented evidence supporting the item-limit hypothesis: Participants reproduced visual features of up to six items in a self-chosen order. After the third or fourth response, error distributions were indistinguishable from guessing. I present four experiments with young adults (each N=24) testing the assumption that the brief, simultaneous display of visual arrays has led to failures of encoding in the experiments of Adam et al. (2017). Experiment 1 presented items slowly and sequentially. Experiment 2 presented them simultaneously but longer than in the experiments of Adam et al. (2017). Experiments 3 and 4 exactly replicated one original experiment. There was no evidence for an encoding limit. However, all four experiments failed to replicate the evidence for guessing-like error distributions. Modelling data from individuals revealed a mixture of some who do and others who don’t produce guessing-like distributions. This heterogeneity increases the credibility of an alternative to the item-limit hypothesis: Some individuals decide to guess on hard trials even when they have weak information in memory.

scholarly journals Semantic knowledge influences visual working memory in adults and children

PLoS ONE ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (11) ◽  
pp. e0241110
Author(s):  
Ariel Starr ◽  
Mahesh Srinivasan ◽  
Silvia A. Bunge
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Visual Working Memory ◽  
Real World ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Semantic Knowledge ◽  
Visual Features ◽  
Low Level ◽  
Adults And Children ◽  
Abstract Stimuli ◽  
Familiar Objects

We can retain only a portion of the visual information that we encounter within our visual working memory. Which factors influence how much information we can remember? Recent studies have demonstrated that the capacity of visual working memory is influenced by the type of information to be remembered and is greater for real-world objects than for abstract stimuli. One explanation for this effect is that the semantic knowledge associated with real-world objects makes them easier to maintain in working memory. Previous studies have indirectly tested this proposal and led to inconsistent conclusions. Here, we directly tested whether semantic knowledge confers a benefit for visual working memory by using familiar and unfamiliar real-world objects. We found a mnemonic benefit for familiar objects in adults and children between the ages of 4 and 9 years. Control conditions ruled out alternative explanations, namely the possibility that the familiar objects could be more easily labeled or that there were differences in low-level visual features between the two types of objects. Together, these findings demonstrate that semantic knowledge influences visual working memory, which suggests that the capacity of visual working memory is not fixed but instead fluctuates depending on what has to be remembered.

scholarly journals Location-independent feature binding in visual working memory for sequentially presented objects

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Schneegans ◽  
William J. Harrison ◽  
Paul M. Bays
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Visual Working Memory ◽  
Spatial Location ◽  
Feature Binding ◽  
Visual Features ◽  
Stimulus Interval ◽  
Performance Deficits ◽  
Inter Stimulus Interval ◽  
Impaired Binding ◽  
Stimulus Shape

AbstractSpatial location is believed to have a privileged role in binding features held in visual working memory. Supporting this view, Pertzov and Husain (Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 76(7), 1914–1924, 2014) reported that recall of bindings between visual features was selectively impaired when items were presented sequentially at the same location compared to sequentially at different locations. We replicated their experiment, but additionally tested whether the observed impairment could be explained by perceptual interference during encoding. Participants viewed four oriented bars in highly discriminable colors presented sequentially either at the same or different locations, and after a brief delay were cued with one color to reproduce the associated orientation. When we used the same timing as the original study, we reproduced its key finding of impaired binding memory in the same-location condition. Critically, however, this effect was significantly modulated by the duration of the inter-stimulus interval, and disappeared if memoranda were presented with longer delays between them. In a second experiment, we tested whether the effect generalized to other visual features, namely reporting of colors cued by stimulus shape. While we found performance deficits in the same-location condition, these did not selectively affect binding memory. We argue that the observed effects are best explained by encoding interference, and that memory for feature binding is not necessarily impaired when memoranda share the same location.

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