88 research outputs found

    Maintaining binding in working memory: Comparing the effects of intentional goals and incidental affordances

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    Much research on memory for binding depends on incidental measures. However, if encoding associations benefits from conscious attention, then incidental measures of binding memory might not yield a sufficient understanding of how binding is accomplished. Memory for letters and spatial locations was compared in three within-participants tasks, one in which binding was not afforded by stimulus presentation, one in which incidental binding was possible, and one in which binding was explicitly to be remembered. Some evidence for incidental binding was observed, but unique benefits of explicit binding instructions included preserved discrimination as set size increased and drastic reduction in false alarms to lures that included a new spatial location and an old letter. This suggests that substantial cognitive benefits, including enhanced memory for features themselves, might occur through intentional binding, and that incidental measures of binding might not reflect these advantages. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

    Working memory theory remains stuck: Reply to Hanley and Young

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    Spatial sequences, but not verbal sequences, are vulnerable to general interference during retention in working memory

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    Among models of working memory, there is not yet a consensus about how to describe functions specific to storing verbal or visual-spatial memories. We presented aural-verbal and visual-spatial lists simultaneously and sometimes cued one type of information after presentation, comparing accuracy in conditions with and without informative retro-cues. This design isolates interference due specifically to maintenance, which appears most clearly in the uncued trials, from interference due to encoding, which occurs in all dual-task trials. When recall accuracy was comparable between tasks, we found that spatial memory was worse in uncued than in retro-cued trials, whereas verbal memory was not. Our findings bolster proposals that maintenance of spatial serial order, like maintenance of visual materials more broadly, relies on general rather than specialized resources, while maintenance of verbal sequences may rely on domain-specific resources. We argue that this asymmetry should be explicitly incorporated into models of working memor

    Maintaining cross-domain objects and features in working memory : implications for storage in models of working memory

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    The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file.Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on February 26, 2008)Vita.Thesis (Ph. D.) University of Missouri-Columbia 2007.A great deal of evidence, both from behavioral studies of cross-domain interference and from neuroimaging, suggests the need for a domain-general store in models of working memory. Baddeley included such a store in an updated version of the influential multiple component model (2000), but it is still unknown how this new component interacts with better-known working memory components. Using cross-domain objects (letters in spatial locations) for memoranda, the following experiments aimed to learn whether domain-specific and domain-general stores can be used concurrently, and in doing so to better understand how components of a working memory system interact. A critical finding shows that concurrent articulatory suppression impairs memory for integrated cross-domain objects that include spatial location features, but does not affect spatial locations when they are represented as isolated features. This evidence is interpreted as support for a domain-general store capable of accommodating different representations for spatial materials and capable of interfacing with verbal rehearsal mechanisms, depending on memory demands.Includes bibliographical reference

    The case against specialized visual-spatial short-term memory

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    The dominant paradigm for understanding working memory, or the combination of the perceptual, attentional, and mnemonic processes needed for thinking, subdivides short-term memory (STM) according to whether memoranda are encoded in aural-verbal or visual formats. This traditional dissociation has been supported by examples of neuropsychological patients who seem to selectively lack STM for either aural-verbal, visual, or spatial memoranda, and by experimental research using dual-task methods. Though this evidence is the foundation of assumptions of modular STM systems, the case it makes for a specialized visual STM system is surprisingly weak. I identify the key evidence supporting a distinct verbal STM system—patients with apparent selective damage to verbal STM and the resilience of verbal short-term memories to general dual-task interference—and apply these benchmarks to neuropsychological and experimental investigations of visual-spatial STM. Contrary to the evidence on verbal STM, patients with apparent visual or spatial STM deficits tend to experience a wide range of additional deficits, making it difficult to conclude that a distinct short-term store was damaged. Consistently with this, a meta-analysis of dual-task visual-spatial STM research shows that robust dual-task costs are consistently observed regardless of the domain or sensory code of the secondary task. Together, this evidence suggests that positing a specialized visual STM system is not necessary

    Perceptual grouping boosts visual working memory capacity and reduces effort during retention

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    Consistent, robust boosts to visual working memory capacity are observed when colour–location arrays contain duplicate colours. The prevailing explanation suggests that duplicated colours are encoded as one perceptual group. If so, then we should observe not only higher working memory capacity overall for displays containing duplicates, but specifically an improved ability to remember unique colours from displays including duplicates compared with displays comprising all uniquely coloured items. Furthermore, less effort should be required to retain displays as colour redundancy increases. I recorded gaze position and pupil sizes during a visual change detection task including displays of 4–6 items with either all unique colours, two items with a common colour, or three items with a common colour in samples of young and healthy elderly adults. Increased redundancy was indeed associated with higher estimated working memory capacity, both for tests of duplicates and uniquely coloured items. Redundancy was also associated with decreased pupil size during retention, especially in young adults. While elderly adults also benefited from colour redundancy, spillover to unique items was less obvious with low redundancy than in young adults. This experiment confirms previous findings and presents complementary novel evidence linking perceptual grouping via colour redundancy with decreased mental effort

    Forget me if you can:Attentional capture by to-be-remembered and to-be-forgotten visual stimuli

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    Previous studies on directed forgetting in visual working memory (VWM) have shown that if people are cued to remember only a subset of the items currently held in VWM, they will completely forget the uncued, no-longer relevant it ems. While this finding is indicative of selective remembering, it remains unclear whether directed forgetting can also occur in the absence of any concurrent to-be-remembered information. In the current study, we addressed this matter by asking participants to memorize a single object that could be followed by a cue to forget or remember this object. Following the cue, we assessed the object’s activation in VWM by determining whether a matching distractor would capture attention in a visual search task. The results showed that, compared to a cue to remember, a cue to forget led to a reduced likelihood of attentional capture by a matching distractor. In addition, we found that capture effects by to-be-remembered and to-be-forgotten dis tractors remained stable as the interval between the onset of the cue and the search task increased from 700 ms to 3900 ms. We conclude that, in the absence of any to-be-remembered objects, an instruction to forget an object held in WM leads to a rapid but incomplete deactivation of the representation of that object, thus allowing it to continue to produce a weak biasing effect on attentional selection for several seconds after the instruction to forget
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