Detection of the number of changes in a display in working memory.

Cowan, Nelson; Hardman, Kyle O.; Saults, J. Scott; Blume, Christopher L.; Clark, Katherine M.; Sunday, Mackenzie A.

doi:10.1037/xlm0000163

Cited by 15 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 76 publications

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“…Previous work has demonstrated that subjective confidence strongly predicts mnemonic precision (Rademaker, Tredway, & Tong, 2012) and correlates strongly with fluctuations in trial-by-trial performance (Adam & Vogel, 2017; Cowan et al., 2016). Our finding that subjects consistently reported the best-remembered items first also suggests that subjects have strong meta-knowledge regarding the contents of working memory.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Clear evidence for item limits in visual working memory

Adam

Vogel²,

Awh

2017

Cognitive Psychology

192

243

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There is a consensus that visual working memory (WM) resources are sharply limited, but debate persists regarding the simple question of whether there is a limit to the total number of items that can be stored concurrently. Zhang and Luck (2008) advanced this debate with an analytic procedure that provided strong evidence for random guessing responses, but their findings can also be described by models that deny guessing while asserting a high prevalence of low precision memories. Here, we used a whole report memory procedure in which subjects reported all items in each trial, and indicated whether they were guessing with each response. Critically, this procedure allowed us to measure memory performance for all items in each trial. When subjects were asked to remember 6 items, the response error distributions for about 3 out of the 6 items were best fit by a parameter-free guessing model (i.e. a uniform distribution). In addition, subjects’ self-reports of guessing precisely tracked the guessing rate estimated with a mixture model. Control experiments determined that guessing behavior was not due to output interference, and that there was still a high prevalence of guessing when subjects were instructed not to guess. Our novel approach yielded evidence that guesses, not low-precision representations, best explain limitations in working memory. These guesses also corroborate a capacity-limited working memory system – we found evidence that subjects are able to report non-zero information for only 3–4 items. Thus, WM capacity is constrained by an item limit that precludes the storage of more than 3–4 individuated feature values.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Clear evidence for item limits in visual working memory

Adam

Vogel²,

Awh

2017

Cognitive Psychology

192

243

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“…It is known that people do have awareness of the number of items that they can recall when they are explicitly asked to report this (Rademaker et al, 2012;Cowan et al, 2016). It is possible that the present task of quantifying uncertainty in recall of the tested hue may have focussed introspection on precision, rather than the number of items in memory.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…In the context of memory this may be called 'metamemory'. At least to some degree, young adults have accurate metacognitive awareness of VSTM representations and fluctuation in performance across trials (Fougnie et al, 2012;Rademaker et al, 2012;Vandenbroucke et al, 2014;Cowan et al, 2016;Adam and Vogel, 2017;Suchow et al, 2017; but see Trubutschek et al, 2017 for a demonstration that non-conscious mechanisms can also support VSTM). In some situations, people are able to strategically reallocate resources across memory items (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual short-term memory through the lifespan: preserved benefits of context and metacognition

Mitchell¹,

Cam‐CAN²,

Cusack³

2017

Preprint

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Visual short-term memory ability falls throughout the lifespan in healthy adults. Using a continuous report task, in a large, population-based sample, we first confirmed that this decline affects the quality and quantity of reported memories as well as knowledge of which item went where. Visual and sensorimotor precision also worsened with advancing age, but this did not account for the reduced memory performance.We then considered two strategies that older individuals might be able to adopt, to offset these memory declines: the use of contextual encoding, and metacognitive monitoring of performance.Context and metacognitive awareness were both associated with significantly better performance, however these effects did not interact with age in our sample. This suggests that older adults retain their capacity to boost memory performance through attention to external context and monitoring of their performance. Strategies that focus on taking advantage of these preserved abilities may therefore help to maintain short-term memory performance with advancing age. The paper reports on analysis of the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) data.3

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“…Because participants could easily be inaccurate about their WM abilities (c.f. Cowan et al, in press), it would not be surprising if participants did not use our informed guessing formulation perfectly. This could result in bias in the estimates of P IG and potentially other parameters as well.…”

Section: Informed Guessing In the CD Taskmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reasoning and memory: People make varied use of the information available in working memory.

Hardman

Cowan

2016

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Working memory (WM) is used for storing information in a highly-accessible state so that other mental processes, such as reasoning, can use that information. Some WM tasks require that participants not only store information, but also reason about that information in order to perform optimally on the task. In this study, we used visual WM tasks that had both storage and reasoning components in order to determine both how ideally people are able to reason about information in WM and if there is a relationship between information storage and reasoning. We developed novel psychological process models of the tasks that allowed us to estimate for each participant both how much information they had in WM and how efficiently they reasoned about that information. Our estimates of information use showed that participants are not all ideal information users or minimal information users, but rather that there are individual differences in the thoroughness of information use in our WM tasks. However, we found that our participants tended to be more ideal than minimal. One implication of this work is that in order to accurately estimate the amount of information in WM, it is important to also estimate how efficiently that information is used. This new analysis contributes to the theoretical premise that human rationality may be bounded by the complexity of task demands.

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Detection of the number of changes in a display in working memory.

Cited by 15 publications

References 76 publications

Clear evidence for item limits in visual working memory

Clear evidence for item limits in visual working memory

Visual short-term memory through the lifespan: preserved benefits of context and metacognition

Reasoning and memory: People make varied use of the information available in working memory.

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