Crowdsourced single-trial probes of visual working memory for irrelevant features

Shin, Hongsup; Ji, Wei

doi:10.1167/16.5.10

Cited by 34 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Experiments may also require recruiting participants from disparate cultural backgrounds (Curtis and Bharucha, 2009; Henrich et al, 2010) that are more readily recruited online than in person. Alternatively, it may be desirable to run only a small number of trials on each participant, or even just a single critical trial (Simons and Chabris, 1999; Shin and Ma, 2016), after which the participant may become aware of the experiment’s purpose. In all of these cases recruiting adequate sets of participants in the lab might be prohibitively difficult, and online experiments facilitated by a headphone check could be a useful addition to a psychoacoustician’s toolbox.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This makes behavioral research highly accessible and efficient, and the ability to obtain data from large samples or diverse populations allows new kinds of questions to be addressed. Crowdsourcing has become popular in a number of subfields within cognitive psychology (Buhrmester et al, 2011; Crump et al, 2013), including visual perception (Brady and Alvarez, 2011; Freeman et al, 2013; Shin and Ma, 2016), cognition (Frank and Goodman, 2012; Hartshorne and Germine, 2015), and linguistics (Sprouse, 2010; Gibson et al, 2011; Saunders et al, 2013). Experimenters in these fields have developed methods to maximize the quality of web-collected data (Meade and Bartholomew, 2012; Chandler et al, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Headphone screening to facilitate web-based auditory experiments

Woods

Siegel²,

Traer³

et al. 2017

Atten Percept Psychophys

352

230

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Psychophysical experiments conducted remotely over the internet permit data collection from large numbers of participants, but sacrifice control over sound presentation, and therefore are not widely employed in hearing research. To help standardize online sound presentation, we introduce a brief psychophysical test for determining if online experiment participants are wearing headphones. Listeners judge which of three pure tones is quietest, with one of the tones presented 180° out of phase across the stereo channels. This task is intended to be easy over headphones but difficult over loudspeakers due to phase-cancellation. We validated the test in the lab by testing listeners known to be wearing headphones or listening over loudspeakers. The screening test was effective and efficient, discriminating between the two modes of listening with a small number of trials. When run online, a bimodal distribution of scores was obtained, suggesting that some participants performed the task over loudspeakers despite instructions to use headphones. The ability to detect and screen out these participants mitigates concerns over sound quality for online experiments, a first step toward opening auditory perceptual research to the possibilities afforded by crowdsourcing.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Headphone screening to facilitate web-based auditory experiments

Woods

Siegel²,

Traer³

et al. 2017

Atten Percept Psychophys

352

230

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Memory for different features can be differentially affected by retro‐cues indicating which feature dimension is going to be tested (Park, Sy, Hong, & Tong, ), supporting some independence in storing different features of the same items, but also a trade‐off of capacity between them. A number of studies have also investigated to what degree task‐irrelevant features are memorized, finding low‐precision, but above‐chance performance in surprise tests (Shin & Ma, , ; Swan et al ., ), some degree of interference from irrelevant feature changes (Gao, Gao, Li, Sun, & Shen, ; Hyun, Woodman, Vogel, Hollingworth, & Luck, ; Shen, Tang, Wu, Shui, & Gao, ), and limitations on the ability to ignore features of specific items in mixed displays (Marshall & Bays, ; Vidal, Gauchou, Tallon‐Baudry, & Oregan, ).…”

Section: Objects and Featuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

New perspectives on binding in visual working memory

Schneegans

Bays

2018

British J of Psychology

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How does visual working memory (WM) store the binding between different features of a visual object (like colour, orientation, and location), and does memorizing these bindings require additional resources beyond memorizing individual features? These questions have traditionally been addressed by comparing performance across different types of change detection task. More recently, experimental tasks such as analogue (cued) recall, combined with analysis methods including Bayesian hypothesis testing and formal model comparison, have shed new light on the properties of WM. A significant new perspective is that noise in neural representation limits the precision of recall, and several recent models incorporate this view to account for failures of binding in WM. We review the literature on feature binding with a focus on these new developments and discuss their implications for the interpretation of classical findings.

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“…Furthermore, in the cognitive psychology literature, surprise test methodologies are an important tool for explicitly probing memory of stimuli that subjects did not expect to report. Inattentional blindness (Mack & Rock, 1998), change blindness (Simons & Levin, 1997), and attribute amnesia (Chen & Wyble, 2015a) have importantly shown the limitations of human visual processing by using surprise tests (e.g., Chen, Swan, & Wyble, 2016;Eitam, Shoval, & Yeshurun, 2015;Eitam, Yeshurun, Hassan, 2013;Shin & Ma, 2016;Swan, Collins, & Wyble, 2016). It is debated whether the inability to answer such surprise questions is due to a failure to encode the information (i.e., a failure of perception; Mack & Rock, 1998) or a loss of the contents of working memory (i.e., amnesia ;Jiang, Shupe, Swallow, & Tan, 2016;Wolfe, 1999).…”

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confidence: 99%

Working memory representations persist in the face of unexpected task alterations

Swan

Wyble

Chen

2017

Atten Percept Psychophys

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It is well known that information can be held in memory while performing other tasks concurrently, such as remembering a color or number during a separate visual search task. However, it is not clear what happens to stored information in the face of unexpected tasks, such as the surprise questions that are often used in experiments related to inattentional and change blindness. Does the unpredicted shift in task context cause memory representations to be cleared in anticipation of new information? To answer this question, we ran two experiments where the task unexpectedly switched partway through the experiment with a surprise question. Half of the participants were asked to report the same attribute (Exp. 1 = Identity, Exp. 2 = Color) of a target stimulus in both presurprise and postsurprise trials, while for the other half, the reported attribute switched from identity to color (Exp. 1) or vice versa (Exp. 2). Importantly, all participants had to read an unexpected set of instructions and respond differently on the surprise trial. Accuracy on the surprise trial was higher for the same-attribute groups than the different-attribute groups. Furthermore, there was no difference in reaction time on the surprise trial between the two groups. These results suggest that information participants expected to report can survive an encounter with an unexpected task. The implication is that failures to report information on a surprise trial in many experiments reflect genuine differences in memory encoding, rather than forgetting or overwriting induced by the surprise question.Keywords Memory: Visual working and short-term memory . Attention: Interactions with Memory . Attention and memory While the capabilities of working memory have been well studied for cases in which subjects are performing a task that they know in advance (for review, see Baddeley, 2003), there is relatively little data available concerning the reportability of information when participants encounter an immediate surprising question. In other words, when participants are performing a routine task and are asked a surprise question, will the just-stored information be accessible for report? This question is important to answer for several reasons. First, natural experience often forces us to confront surprising situations and it is important to know how reliably information from previous moments can be retrieved after such events. There has been a lot of research on task switches that are expected (see Kiesel et al., 2010, for a review), but not much is known about how working memory responds in the case of a completely unanticipated change in task. Surprising events could potentially cause stored information to be cleared from memory to facilitate the ability to process and store information about the unexpected event. Furthermore, in the cognitive psychology literature, surprise test methodologies are an important tool for explicitly probing memory of stimuli that sub-

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Crowdsourced single-trial probes of visual working memory for irrelevant features

Cited by 34 publications

References 25 publications

Headphone screening to facilitate web-based auditory experiments

Headphone screening to facilitate web-based auditory experiments

New perspectives on binding in visual working memory

Working memory representations persist in the face of unexpected task alterations

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