Bridging the gap between visual temporary memory and working memory: The role of stimuli distinctiveness.

Shoval, Roy; Luria, Roy; Makovski, Tal

doi:10.1037/xlm0000778

Cited by 16 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…The second goal of Experiment 3 was to test the role of semantics in the metacognitive processes of VWM. Indeed, a notable difference between complex, real-world objects and simple stimuli is that semantic meaning might be involved in VWM tasks, particularly when using real-world objects (Shoval et al, 2019). The role of meaning might be especially important in metacognition as reporting about explicit subjective judgments, while the probe is presented, could be biased by item's label and meaning (e.g., "I haven't seen this car").…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One way to minimize proactive interference is by using realworld objects instead of simple stimuli. These stimuli afford to test numerous distinct items without repetition throughout the experiment (Endress and Potter, 2014;Makovski, 2016;Shoval et al, 2019). Testing real-world objects in VWM tasks further bears an ecological benefit as we typically interact with meaningful, rich, complex objects and not with impoverished stimuli such as color patches.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Testing real-world objects in VWM tasks further bears an ecological benefit as we typically interact with meaningful, rich, complex objects and not with impoverished stimuli such as color patches. Accordingly, recent findings showed that the visual and semantic heterogeneity of meaningful objects leads to an improved VWM performance and extend the typical limit of VWM capacity (Brady et al, 2016;Shoval et al, 2019). However, it is still unknown how accurate people are in monitoring VWM of rich, real-world objects.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Metacognitive Perspective of Visual Working Memory With Rich Complex Objects

2020

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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.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Metacognitive Perspective of Visual Working Memory With Rich Complex Objects

2020

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“…These measures rest on the same problematic assumptions as the K measure, another threshold measure. (4) Some researchers opt to simply combine hits and correct rejections (the complement of false alarms) by calculating overall "percent correct" (Cappell, Gmeindl, & Reuter-Lorenz, 2010;Gao & Theeuwes, 2020;Harthsorne & Makovski, 2019;Luck & Vogel, 1997;Luria & Vogel, 2011;Maxcey-Richard & Hollingworth, 2013;Parra, Della Sala, Logie, & Morcom, 2014;Pessoa, Gutierrez, Bandettini, & Ungerleider, 2002;Postle, Druzgal, & D'Esposito, 2003;Potter, Staub, Raud, & O'Connor, 2002;Ricker, Sandry, Vergauwe, & Cowan, 2020;Shoval, Luria, & Makovski, 2020;Sloutsky & Fisher, 2004;Tas, Luck, & Hollingworth 2016;Wagner, Kashyap, Diekelmann, & Born, 2007;Yan, Young, & Andrews, 2017). Intuitively, this measure feels objective, as if it is not dependent on any theoretical assumptions.…”

Section: For Examplementioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring memory is harder than you think: How to avoid problematic measurement practices in memory research

Tf¹,

Mm²,

Williams³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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There is a crisis of measurement in memory research, with major implications for theory and practice. This crisis arises because of a critical complication present when measuring memory using the recognition memory task that dominates the study of working memory and long-term memory (“did you see this item? yes/no” or “did this item change? yes/no”). Such tasks give two measures of performance, the “hit rate” (how often you say you previously saw an item you actually did previously see) and the “false alarm rate” (how often you say you saw something you never saw). Yet what researchers want is one single, integrated measure of memory performance. Integrating the hit and false alarm rate into a single measure, however, requires a complex problem of counterfactual reasoning that depends on the (unknowable) distribution of underlying memory signals: when faced with two people differing in both hit rate and false alarm rate, the question of who had the better memory is really “who would have had more hits if they each had the same number of false alarms”. As a result of this difficulty, different literatures in memory research (e.g., visual working memory, eyewitness identification, picture memory, etc) have settled on a variety of distinct metrics to combine hit rates and false alarm rates (e.g., A’, corrected hit rate, percent correct, d’, diagnosticity ratios, K values, etc.). These metrics make different, contradictory assumptions about the distribution of latent memory signals, and all of their assumptions are frequently incorrect. Despite a large literature on how to properly measure memory performance, spanning decades, real-life decisions are often made using these metrics, even when they subsequently turn out to be wrong when memory is studied with better measures. We suggest that in order for the psychology and neuroscience of memory to become a cumulative, theory-driven science, more attention must be given to measurement issues. We make a concrete suggestion: the default memory task should change from old/new (“did you see this item’?”) to forced-choice (“which of these two items did you see?”). In situations where old/new variants are preferred (e.g., eyewitness identification; theoretical investigations of the nature of memory decisions), receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis should always be performed.

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“…Time is important not only to allow initial entry of items into a capacity-limited WM (Woodman & Vogel, 2005), but also to allow further consolidation of WM information (Ricker et al, 2018). By using known objects rather than abstract objects such as colored bars, and presenting each object in only one array, we attempt to maximize the likelihood that pre-existing knowledge can play a role to allow the creation of accessible new LTM representations (Endress & Potter, 2014;Shoval et al, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Working memory limits severely constrain long-term retention

2020

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There has been considerable controversy in recent years as to whether information held in working memory (WM) is rapidly forgotten or automatically transferred to long-term memory (LTM). Although visual WM capacity is very limited, we appear able to store a virtually infinite amount of information in visual LTM. Still, LTM retrieval often fails. Some view visual WM as a mental sketchpad that is wiped clean when new information enters, but not a consistent precursor of LTM. Others view the WM and LTM systems as inherently linked. Distinguishing between these possibilities has been difficult, as attempts to directly manipulate the active holding of information in visual WM has typically introduced various confounds. Here, we capitalized on the WM system's capacity limitation to control the likelihood that visual information was actively held in WM. Our young-adult participants (N = 103) performed a WM task with unique everyday items, presented in groups of two, four, six, or eight items. Presentation time was adjusted according to the number of items. Subsequently, we tested participants' LTM for items from the WM task. LTM was better for items presented originally within smaller WM set sizes, indicating that WM limitations contribute to subsequent LTM failures, and that holding items in WM enhances LTM encoding. Our results suggest that a limit in WM capacity contributes to an LTM encoding bottleneck for trial-unique familiar objects, with a relatively large effect size.

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Bridging the gap between visual temporary memory and working memory: The role of stimuli distinctiveness.

Cited by 16 publications

References 34 publications

A Metacognitive Perspective of Visual Working Memory With Rich Complex Objects

A Metacognitive Perspective of Visual Working Memory With Rich Complex Objects

Measuring memory is harder than you think: How to avoid problematic measurement practices in memory research

Working memory limits severely constrain long-term retention

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