The role of spatial working memory in visual search efficiency

Oh, Sei Hwan; Kim, Min Shik

doi:10.3758/bf03196570

Cited by 187 publications

(261 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…It would be interesting to know what other mechanisms are engaged during the formation of visual LTM. Substantial evidence suggests close interaction between visual WM and selective visual attention (Alvarez & Cavanagh, 2004;Awh & Jonides, 2001;Luck & Vogel, 1997;Oh & Kim, 2004;Wheeler & Treisman, 2002;Woodman & Luck, 2004). Since selective visual attention plays an important perceptual function for binding elementary visual features (Treisman, 1982;Treisman & Gelade, 1980), one interesting question is whether this function also plays a role in integrating visual information in LTM.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Creation of visual long-term memory

Nikolić

Singer

2007

Perception & Psychophysics

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MethodParticipants and Apparatus. In this experiment we assessed the capacity of WM as a function of the perceptual difficulty of the stimulus. Five female and 2 male participants served in this experiment. Two participants were paid, and the others volunteered. Four different types of stimuli were used; these differed in the degree of pop-out of the array elements. In Condition 1, the elements did not produce perceptual pop-out ( and ). In the other conditions, the cues that permitted preattentive detection of the elements consisted of color (green and red , Condition 2) or shape differences (e.g., and , Condition 3) or a combination of the two cues (green and red , Condition 4) (Figure 2A).Procedure. The sample stimulus was presented for a period of 1 sec, and the size of the array changed adaptively at each trial and according to the participant's performance: After each correct re- Creation of visual long-term memory DANKO NIKOLI AND WOLF SINGER Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt am Main, Germany and Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt, GermanyCurrently, it is not known by which mechanisms novel visual representations are stored in long-term memory (LTM). Here we report evidence that visual working memory (WM) plays an important role in the formation of visual LTM. By varying exposure times and perceptual difficulty of the stimuli, we find that the rate-limiting factor constraining storage in LTM is the amount of information that can be simultaneously kept in WM, whereas the time needed to store this information into LTM is constant irrespective of the size of the WM content. These results support the hypothesis that visual WM serves as a gate for the storage of information into LTM. Perception & Psychophysics 2007, 69 (6), 904-912 D. Nikoli , danko@mpih-frankfurt.mpg.de

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The narrow WM capacity in the non-pop-out condition is also consistent with the notion that WM cannot be loaded sequentially by adding more locations of targets during serial search. Shifting of the spotlight of attention erases the spatial information previously stored in WM (Awh & Jonides, 2001;Oh & Kim, 2004;Woodman & Luck, 2004).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Creation of visual long-term memory

Nikolić

Singer

2007

Perception & Psychophysics

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“…Egeth (1977) and Logan (1978) found that memory load did not interact significantly with factors that affected several stages of RT tasks, including stimulus degradation, stimulus-response compatibility, and the number of items to be examined in visual search, although memory load increased overall RT in each experiment. Recent experiments by Woodman, Vogel, and Luck (2001), Woodman and Luck (2004), and Oh and Kim (2004) replicated these null interactions with the number of items in a visual search display and showed that interactions could be produced only by concurrent tasks that affected executive processing, as well as loading working memory.…”

Section: Toward a Model Of Plan-level And Task-level Processingmentioning

confidence: 94%

What it costs to implement a plan: Plan-level and task-level contributions to switch costs

Logan

2007

Memory & Cognition

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“…Since then, a number of reports have tested this "amnesic" theory of visual search (e.g., McCarley, Wang, Kramer, Irwin, & Peterson, 2003;Oh & Kim, 2004;Peterson, Kramer, Wang, Irwin, & McCarley, 2001;Rensink, 2000;Takeda & Yagi, 2000;Woodman & Luck, 2004). Reviewing all of these findings is out of the scope of the present report.…”

Section: Memory For Distractors During Interrupted Visual Searchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Consequences of display changes during interrupted visual search: Rapid resumption is target specific

Lleras

Rensink

Enns

2007

Perception & Psychophysics

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), pointing to an important limit in the nature of what is remembered during search.In a recent study, Lleras, Rensink, and Enns (2005) used an interrupted search paradigm to demonstrate yet another contribution of memory. In that task, participants were presented with only brief glimpses of the search display (typical "look" times were 100 msec), with these glimpses alternating with blank screens of longer durations (typical "wait" times were 900 msec). Despite the difficulty of this task, participants were generally very good at completing it: participants correctly identified the target after only three presentations of the display on more than 75% of the trials and with accuracy levels above 95%. The most surprising aspect of their performance, in light of current theories, was that participants often showed extremely short response latencies to target identification following re-presentation of the display (below 400 msec), a finding Lleras et al. referred to as rapid resumption.To be certain, not all responses following interruptions were fast. A more detailed analysis of the response time (RT) distributions showed that, following interruptions, there appeared be two distinct phases: an early phase peaking in the range of 200-300 msec, and a later phase peaking in the range of 600-800 msec. As an illustration, Figure 1 (based on data from shows the RT distributions following the first presentation of an interrupted search display (panel A), and following all subsequent re-presentations of the search display (panel B). Lleras et al. interpreted the early phase (rapid resumption) as evidence that some perceptual preprocessing 1 of the search display had occurred during the preceding look. As a result, fast RTs were observed whenever that preprocessing included information about the target, whereas slower RTs were observed otherwise. In other words, partial in- Consequences of display changes during interrupted visual search: Rapid resumption is target specific ALEJANDRO LLERASUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois AND RONALD A. RENSINK AND JAMES T. ENNS University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British ColumbiaVisual search can be resumed more rapidly following a brief interruption to an old display than it can be initiated on a new display, pointing to a critical role for memory in search (Lleras, Rensink, & Enns, 2005). Here, we examine how this rapid resumption is affected by changes made to the display during the interruption of search. Rapid resumption was found to depend on the prior presentation of the target, not merely the distractor items (Experiment 1), and was unaffected by the relocation of all distractor items (Experiment 2). Further, whereas changes to response-irrelevant features of the target did not eliminate rapid resumption (Experiment 3), changes to response-relevant features did (Experiment 4). These results point to the target specificity of rapid resumption and are consistent with reentrant theories of visual awareness.

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The role of spatial working memory in visual search efficiency

Cited by 187 publications

References 26 publications

Creation of visual long-term memory

Creation of visual long-term memory

What it costs to implement a plan: Plan-level and task-level contributions to switch costs

Consequences of display changes during interrupted visual search: Rapid resumption is target specific

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