The psychophysics of perceptual memory

Magnussen, Svein; Greenlee, Mark W.

doi:10.1007/s004260050043

Cited by 158 publications

(162 citation statements)

References 73 publications

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“…Bays, Catalao, & Husain, 2009;Bays & Husain, 2008), but individual stimuli can be retained with a high level of detail (Magnussen & Greenlee, 1999). Additionally, Fougnie, Suchow, and Alvarez (2012) have reported that the quality of visual memory varies within an individual, and this variability changes according to the number of stimuli that must be remembered (in their experiment, memory variability increased as the set size was expanded from one to three items, and from three to five items).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, memory for simple visual attributes can be perfectly retained for periods exceeding 10 s (Magnussen, Greenlee, Baumann, & Endestad, 2010). Magnussen and Greenlee (1999) reported that memory for spatial frequency is as accurate at 10-30 s as it as at 1 s, challenging decay. VSTM for motion also appears to be resistant to temporal decay (Blake, Cepeda, & Hiris, 1997;Poom, 2012;Zokaei, Gorgoraptis, Bahrami, Bays, & Husain, 2011).…”

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confidence: 99%

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The loss of short-term visual representations over time: Decay or temporal distinctiveness?

Mercer¹

2014

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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There has been much recent interest in the loss of visual short-term memories over the passage of time. According to decay theory, visual representations are gradually forgotten as time passes, reflecting a slow and steady distortion of the memory trace. However, this is controversial and decay effects can be explained in other ways. The present experiment aimed to reexamine the maintenance and loss of visual information over the short term. Decay and temporal distinctiveness models were tested using a delayed discrimination task, in which participants compared complex and novel objects over unfilled retention intervals of variable length. Experiment 1 found no significant change in the accuracy of visual memory from 2 to 6 s, but the gap separating trials reliably influenced task performance. Experiment 2 found evidence for information loss at a 10-s retention interval, but temporally separating trials restored the fidelity of visual memory, possibly because temporally isolated representations are distinct from older memory traces. In conclusion, visual representations lose accuracy at some point after 6 s, but only within temporally crowded contexts. These findings highlight the importance of temporal distinctiveness within visual short-term memory.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

The loss of short-term visual representations over time: Decay or temporal distinctiveness?

Mercer¹

2014

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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“…several studies that show that the execution of a second task can interfere with memory for one or more stimuli that were presented several seconds earlier (Barrouillet et al, 2004(Barrouillet et al, , 2007Ricker & Cowan, 2010; see also Ueno, Allen, Baddeley, Hitch, & Saito, 2011), and there have also been several studies that found that a distractor can interfere with retention of a similar stimulus shown 1-5 s earlier (e.g., Magnussen & Greenlee, 1999;Magnussen, Greenlee, Asplund, Dyrnes, 1991;Vuontela, Rämä, Raninen, Aronen, & Carlson, 1999). An interesting and important difference between these findings and those of current experiments, however, is that the interference effects follow a markedly different time course.…”

Section: Relationship With Previous Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond a mask and against the bottleneck: Retroactive dual-task interference during working memory consolidation of a masked visual target.

Nieuwenstein¹,

Wyble

2014

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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While studies on visual memory commonly assume that the consolidation of a visual stimulus into working memory is interrupted by a trailing mask, studies on dual-task interference suggest that the consolidation of a stimulus can continue for several hundred milliseconds after a mask. As a result, estimates of the time course of working memory consolidation differ more than an order of magnitude. Here, we contrasted these opposing views by examining if and for how long the processing of a masked display of visual stimuli can be disturbed by a trailing 2-alternative forced choice task (2-AFC; a color discrimination task or a visual or auditory parity judgment task). The results showed that the presence of the 2-AFC task produced a pronounced retroactive interference effect that dissipated across stimulus onset asynchronies of 250 -1,000 ms, indicating that the processing elicited by the 2-AFC task interfered with the gradual consolidation of the earlier shown stimuli. Furthermore, this interference effect occurred regardless of whether the to-be-remembered stimuli comprised a string of letters or an unfamiliar complex visual shape, and it occurred regardless of whether these stimuli were masked. Conversely, the interference effect was reduced when the memory load for the 1st task was reduced, or when the 2nd task was a color detection task that did not require decision making. Taken together, these findings show that the formation of a durable and consciously accessible working memory trace for a briefly shown visual stimulus can be disturbed by a trailing 2-AFC task for up to several hundred milliseconds after the stimulus has been masked. By implication, the current findings challenge the common view that working memory consolidation involves an immutable central processing bottleneck, and they also make clear that consolidation does not stop when a stimulus is masked.Keywords: working-memory consolidation, backward masking, attentional blink, psychological refractory period, retroactive dual-task interferenceIn dealing with a rapid and ever-changing stream of visual sensory input, the storage of information in working memory forms a central requirement for many perceptual and cognitive tasks. While considerable insight has been gained into the quality and quantity of information that can be stored in working memory (e.g., Prinzmetal, Amiri, Allen, & Edwards, 1998;Wilken & Ma, 2004;Zhang & Luck, 2008), the mechanisms that mediate the initial transfer and consolidation of visual information into working memory remain poorly understood. As a case in point, consider the basic but important questions of how long it might take to consolidate a familiar visual stimulus such as a letter, and how this process might be affected when the letter is masked-a common procedure in studies on visual perception, attention, and memory. According to one influential perspective, the appearance of a mask would interrupt consolidation, and therefore the finding that people can recall about four letters from a 100-ms masked display en...

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“…More recent behavioral experiments showed impaired memory performance if a distractor, or memory mask, is presented up to 500 ms after presentation of the memory item (Magnussen et al, 1996;Jolicoeur and Dell'Acqua, 1998;Vogel et al, 2006). The distractor may interfere with the memory representation of the target stimulus, thereby affecting the window of consolidation more directly (Magnussen and Greenlee, 1999;Enns and Di Lollo, 2000).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Topographic Contribution of Early Visual Cortex to Short-Term Memory Consolidation: A Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Study

Ven¹,

Jacobs²,

Sack³

2012

J. Neurosci.

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The neural correlates for retention of visual information in visual short-term memory are considered separate from those of sensory encoding. However, recent findings suggest that sensory areas may play a role also in short-term memory. We investigated the functional relevance, spatial specificity, and temporal characteristics of human early visual cortex in the consolidation of capacity-limited topographic visual memory using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Topographically specific TMS pulses were delivered over lateralized occipital cortex at 100, 200, or 400 ms into the retention phase of a modified change detection task with low or high memory loads. For the high but not the low memory load, we found decreased memory performance for memory trials in the visual field contralateral, but not ipsilateral to the side of TMS, when pulses were delivered at 200 ms into the retention interval. A behavioral version of the TMS experiment, in which a distractor stimulus (memory mask) replaced the TMS pulses, further corroborated these findings. Our findings suggest that retinotopic visual cortex contributes to the short-term consolidation of topographic visual memory during early stages of the retention of visual information. Further, TMS-induced interference decreased the strength (amplitude) of the memory representation, which most strongly affected the high memory load trials.

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The psychophysics of perceptual memory

Cited by 158 publications

References 73 publications

The loss of short-term visual representations over time: Decay or temporal distinctiveness?

The loss of short-term visual representations over time: Decay or temporal distinctiveness?

Beyond a mask and against the bottleneck: Retroactive dual-task interference during working memory consolidation of a masked visual target.

Topographic Contribution of Early Visual Cortex to Short-Term Memory Consolidation: A Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Study

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