A Metacognitive Perspective of Visual Working Memory With Rich Complex Objects

Abstract

Visual working memory (VWM) has been extensively studied in the context of memory capacity. However, less research has been devoted to the metacognitive processes involved in VWM. Most metacognitive studies of VWM studies tested simple, impoverished stimuli, whereas outside of the laboratory setting, we typically interact with meaningful, complex objects. Thus, the present study aimed to explore the extent to which people are able to monitor VWM of real-world objects that are more ecologically valid and further afford less inter-trial interference. Specifically, in three experiments, participants viewed a set of either four or six memory items, consisting of images of unique real-world objects that were not repeated throughout the experiment. Following the memory array, participants were asked to indicate where the probe item appeared (Experiment 1) whether it appeared at all (Experiment 2) or whether it appeared and what was its temporal order (Experiment 3). VWM monitoring was assessed by subjective confidence judgments regarding participants' objective performance. Similar to common metacognitive findings in other domains, we found that subjective judgments overestimated performance and underestimated errors, even for real-world, complex items held in VWM. These biases seem not to be task-specific as they were found in temporal, spatial, and identity VWM tasks. Yet, the results further showed that meaningful, real-world objects were better remembered than distorted items, and this memory advantage also translated to metacognitive measures.

The nationality benefit: Long-term memory associations enhance visual working memory for color-shape conjunctions

“…In sum, the current results show that a reduced VWM capacity for more complex objects can be ameliorated when presenting familiar stimuli that are associated with meaning. This is consistent with findings from several previous studies that everyday objects can be memorized with higher accuracy than artificial, meaningless objects (Asp et al, 2021;Brady et al, 2016;Brady & Störmer, 2020a;Sahar et al, 2020;Stojanoski et al, 2019;Veldsman et al, 2017). However, our results significantly extend these previous reports by further demonstrating that the gains for meaningful stimuli can be dissociated from their inherent information load.…”

“…However, while meaning-related associations derived from LTM may indeed improve object representations in VWM, the different object types presented in Brady et al ( 2016 ) differed not only in terms of their meaning, but also in their constituent perceptual features. Accordingly, follow-up studies attempted to match the perceptual input of meaningless and meaningful to-be-remembered stimuli by presenting scrambled (Asp et al, 2021 ; Brady & Störmer, 2021 ; Sahar et al, 2020 ) or warped (Stojanoski et al, 2019 ; Veldsman et al, 2017 ) versions of the real-world objects. The results consistently showed that meaningful objects were remembered better than perceptually matched, distorted items.…”

Uncertainty is maintained and used in working memory

“…Experimenters have probed memory confidence by asking people to provide a rating ( Rademaker et al., 2012 ; Vandenbroucke et al., 2014 ; Samaha & Postle, 2017 ), choose the best remembered item ( Fougnie et al., 2012 ; Suchow et al., 2017 ), or make a memory-based bet ( Yoo et al., 2018 ; Honig et al., 2020 ). These studies have demonstrated that people have higher working memory confidence on trials that are remembered more accurately (but see Sahar et al., 2020 ; Bona et al., 2013 ; Bona & Silvanto, 2014 ; Vlassova et al., 2014 ; Maniscalco & Lau, 2015 ; Adam & Vogel, 2017 ; Samaha et al., 2016 , for conflicting results), and a computational model in which memory judgments and confidence ratings are derived from the same underlying memory precision can quantitatively account for these joint data ( van den Berg et al., 2017 ).…”

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

“…Consistent with this model of greater engagement of higher-level regions with meaningful stimuli, Salmela et al (2019) have shown that storing faces in memory results in the storage of both low- and high-level information about them, whereas simple orientation stimuli are stored in a solely low-level way. Furthermore, a significant literature has shown, using behavior alone, that familiarity and knowledge improve performance in short-term memory tasks even with perceptually well-matched or even identical stimuli (e.g., Alvarez & Cavanagh, 2004; Brady et al, 2009; Curby et al, 2009; Jackson & Raymond, 2008; Ngiam et al, 2019; O’Donnell et al, 2018; Sahar et al, 2020; Starr et al, 2020). For example, familiar faces appear to be easier to remember than unfamiliar faces (Jackson & Raymond, 2008), and familiar letters, rather than letters from unfamiliar alphabets, are more easily remembered (Ngiam et al, 2019), conceivably due to the ability to recruit high-level features when processing such stimuli.…”