Visual short-term memory: Central capacity limitations in short-term consolidation

Stevanovski, Biljana; Jolicœur, Pierre

doi:10.1080/13506280600871917

Cited by 67 publications

(105 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…While the aforementioned considerations suggest that it is plausible that the consolidation of a visual stimulus can be disrupted by means of a trailing 2-AFC task, it is important to note that this type of retroactive interference effect has thus far not been observed in studies that combined a memory encoding task with a trailing 2-AFC task (Arnell & Duncan, 2002;Arnell et al, 2004;Jolicoeur & Dell'Acqua, 1998;Koch & Rumiati, 2006;Ruthruff & Pashler, 2001;Stevanovski & Jolicoeur, 2007Tombu et al, 2011). To be precise, these studies all found that performance on the 2-AFC task suffers a pronounced proactive interference effect in the form of a psychological refractory period effect (i.e., a decrease in response times with increasing stimulus onset asynchrony [SOA]; Welford, 1952;see also Pashler, 1994), whereas performance on the memory task showed little to no evidence for a concomitant retroactive interference effect.…”

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To be precise, there are several neuroimaging studies that show that WMC relies on a network of frontal and parietal brain areas that are also activated in tasks that require participants to decide upon and select an appropriate response for a stimulus (Marti, Sigman, & Dehaene, 2012;Tombu et al, 2011; see also Marois & Ivanoff, 2005;Zylberberg, Slezak, Roelfsema, Dehaene, & Sigman, 2010). Furthermore, there are several behavioral studies that suggest that these two types of tasks produce interference when they need to be performed for two targets shown in close temporal succession (e.g., Arnell & Duncan, 2002;Arnell, Helion, Hurdelbrink, & Pasieka, 2004;De Jong & Sweet, 1994;Jolicoeur & Dell'Acqua, 1998Koch & Rumiati, 2006;Ruthruff & Pashler, 2001;Stevanovski & Jolicoeur, 2007see also Wong, 2002). Accordingly, we reasoned that if the consolidation of a visual stimulus continues after a mask, then it might still suffer interference from a trailing 2-AFC task because the execution of this task would call upon the same central processing resources that mediate the ongoing consolidation of the earlier shown stimuli.…”

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To be precise, there have been several previous studies that combined a memory task with an ensuing speeded 2-AFC task, and the results of these studies typically show a pronounced psychological refractory period effect for the 2-AFC task and little to no retroactive interference for the memory task (Arnell & Duncan, 2002;Arnell et al, 2004;Jolicoeur & Dell'Acqua, 1998Koch & Rumiati, 2006;Ruthruff & Pashler, 2001;Stevanovski & Jolicoeur, 2007Tombu et al, 2011). Likewise, research on the attentional blink has yielded hundreds of studies that show a severe attentional blink deficit for recall of the second target, whereas recall of the first target is typically highly accurate (Dux & Marois, 2009;Martens & Wyble, 2010), although in some conditions, recall of the first target does show a slight impairment when the second target follows within 100 ms or less (e.g., Bowman & Wyble, 2007;Chun & Potter, 1995;see also Bachmann & Hommuk, 2005;Potter, Staub, & O'Connor, 2002).…”

Section: Relationship With Previous Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Importantly, however, closer scrutiny of the methods and results of the experiments at stake shows that the lack of retroactive interference may be more apparent than real. To wit, most of these studies used a memory task for which performance was close to ceiling, but the few studies that used a relatively difficult memory task do seem to show some degree of improvement in first-target performance across SOA (e.g., Experiment 2 in Arnell & Duncan, 2002; the conditions with a memory set of three symbols in Experiments 3 and 5 by Jolicoeur & Dell'Acqua, 1998; Experiment 3 in Stevanovski & Jolicoeur, 2007). Indeed, the current study shows that the consolidation of a masked visual stimulus can suffer pronounced retroactive interference from a trailing 2-AFC task, but the magnitude of this effect depends on the difficulty of both tasks.…”

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To wit, the results of these previous studies typically show that performance for the first of two successive targets is accurate, whereas performance for the second target suffers a pronounced attentional blink or psychological refractory period effect, meaning that the second target tends to be missed (i.e., an attentional blink effect), or responded to slowly (i.e., a psychological refractory period effect), when it appears shortly after the first target (e.g., Arnell & Duncan, 2002;Arnell et al, 2004;Jolicoeur & Dell'Acqua, 1998Koch & Rumiati, 2006;Ruthruff & Pashler, 2001;Stevanovski & Jolicoeur, 2007Tombu et al, 2011). In contrast, the results of Experiments 1 and 2 showed only a minor psychological refractory period effect, but they did show a pronounced retroactive interference effect.…”

Section: Experiments 3-5: Boundary Conditions Of the Retroactive Intementioning

confidence: 99%

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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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Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Relationship With Previous Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Experiments 3-5: Boundary Conditions Of the Retroactive Intementioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

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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Oscillatory activity in parietal and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during retention in visual short‐term memory: Additive effects of spatial attention and memory load

Grimault

Robitaille

Grova

et al. 2009

Human Brain Mapping

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We used whole-head magnetoencephalography to study the representation of objects in visual short-term memory (VSTM) in the human brain. Subjects remembered the location and color of either two or four colored disks that were encoded from the left or right visual field (equal number of distractors in the other visual hemifield). The data were analyzed using time-frequency methods, which enabled us to discover a strong oscillatory activity in the 8-15 Hz band during the retention interval. The study of the alpha power variation revealed two types of responses, in different brain regions. The first was a decrease in alpha power in parietal cortex, contralateral to the stimuli, with no load effect. The second was an increase of alpha power in parietal and lateral prefrontal cortex, as memory load increased, but without interaction with the hemifield of the encoded stimuli. The absence of interaction between side of encoded stimuli and memory load suggests that these effects reflect distinct underlying mechanisms. A novel method to localize the neural generators of load-related oscillatory activity was devised, using cortically-constrained distributed source-localization methods. Some activations were found in the inferior intraparietal sulcus (IPS) and intraoccipital sulcus (IOS). Importantly, strong oscillatory activity was also found in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). Alpha oscillatory activity in DLPFC was synchronized with the activity in parietal regions, suggesting that VSTM functions in the human brain may be implemented via a network that includes bilateral DLPFC and bilateral IOS/IPS as key nodes.

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Working memory

Ricker

AuBuchon

Cowan

2010

WIRES Cognitive Science

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The working memory system maintains the limited information that can be kept in mind at one time. These memories are distinct from the vast amount of information stored in long-term memory. Here we give a brief summary of findings over the past half-century in the areas of working memory that we see as particularly important for understanding its nature. We discuss several current controversies, including whether there are different systems or brain modules for different kinds of working memory, why we lose items from working memory, and how individuals and age groups differ. We try to describe what is and is not known. Last, a discussion of findings from neuroimaging helps to constrain working memory theory.

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Visual short-term memory: Central capacity limitations in short-term consolidation

Cited by 67 publications

References 30 publications

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

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

Oscillatory activity in parietal and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during retention in visual short‐term memory: Additive effects of spatial attention and memory load

Working memory

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