Working Memory Has Better Fidelity Than Long-Term Memory: The Fidelity Constraint Is Not a General Property of Memory After All

Biderman, Natalie; Luria, Roy; Teodorescu, Andrei; Hajaj, Ron; Goshen‐Gottstein, Yonatan

doi:10.1177/0956797618813538

Cited by 14 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Future work may also extend our approach to look at other stimulus dimensions, such as color (Biderman et al, 2019;Brady et al, 2013), orientation (Korkki et al, 2020), shape (A. Y. Li, Liang, Lee, & Barense, 2020), and faces (Lorenc, Pratte, Angeloni, & Tong, 2014).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Tasks like the one used in the present work can allow us to distinguish failure of retrieval from imprecise retrieval of the target location. In particular we can use a mixture modeling approach to do so (see, e.g., Biderman, Luria, Teodorescu, Hajaj, & Goshen-Gottstein, 2019;Brady, Konkle, Gill, Oliva, & Alvarez, 2013;Richter, Cooper, Bays, & Simons, 2016;W. Zhang & Luck, 2008).…”

Section: Distinguishing the Success And (Im)precision Of Recallmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Specifically, in the short-term task the 3-object arrays were presented for 3 seconds and followed by a pattern mask (to eliminate lingering sensory information), whereas arrays were presented for 3 times this duration in the long-term task and were not masked. Further, 15 colors were recalled during each test of long-term memory, resulting in a much greater chance of output interference (see Biderman et al, 2019) relative to the single test following each short-term trial.…”

Section: Distinguishing the Success And (Im)precision Of Recallmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Age differences in the precision of memory at short and long delays.

Rhodes¹,

Abbene²,

Meierhofer³

et al. 2020

Psychology and Aging

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Age differences are well established for many memory tasks assessing both short-term and long-term memory. However, how age differences in performance vary with increasing delay between study and test is less clear. Here we report two experiments in which participants studied a continuous sequence of object-location pairings. Test events were intermixed such that participants were asked to recall the precise location of an object following a variable delay. Older adults exhibit a greater degree of error (distance between studied and recalled locations) relative to younger adults at short (0-2 intervening events) and longer delays (10-25 intervening events). Mixture modeling of the distribution of recall error suggests that older adults do not fail to recall information at a significantly higher rate than younger adults. Instead, what they do recall appears to be less precise. Follow up analyses demonstrate that this age difference emerges following only one or two intervening events between study and test. These findings are consistent with the suggestion that aging does not greatly impair recall from the focus of attention but age differences emerge once information is displaced from this highly accessible state. Further, we suggest that age differences in the precision of memory, but not the probability of successful recall, may be due to the use of more gist-like representations in this task.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Distinguishing the Success And (Im)precision Of Recallmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Distinguishing the Success And (Im)precision Of Recallmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Age differences in the precision of memory at short and long delays.

Rhodes¹,

Abbene²,

Meierhofer³

et al. 2020

Psychology and Aging

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A recent conceptual replication of the Brady et al (2013) study, using a larger number of participants and a Bayesian analysis, found evidence for a larger von Mises standard deviation in recall from long-term memory than on a three-item working memory task ( Biderman, Luria, Teodorescu, Hajaj, & Goshen-Gottstein, 2018 ). Like the Rademaker et al study, this finding is consistent with the predictions of our model.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Theory of neural coding predicts an upper bound on estimates of memory variability.

Taylor¹,

Bays²

2020

Psychological Review

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Observers reproducing elementary visual features from memory after a short delay produce errors consistent with the encoding-decoding properties of neural populations. While inspired by electrophysiological observations of sensory neurons in cortex, the population coding account of these errors is based on a mathematical idealization of neural response functions that abstracts away most of the heterogeneity and complexity of real neuronal populations. Here we examine a more physiologically grounded model based on the tuning of a large set of neurons recorded in macaque V1, and show that key predictions of the idealized model are preserved.Both models predict long-tailed distributions of error when memory resources are taxed, as observed empirically in behavioral experiments and commonly approximated with a mixture of normal and uniform error components. Specifically, for an idealized homogeneous neural population, the width of the fitted normal distribution cannot exceed the average tuning width of the component neurons, and this also holds to a good approximation for more biologically realistic populations. Examining eight published studies of orientation recall, we find a consistent pattern of results suggestive of a median tuning width of approximately 20 degrees, which compares well with neurophysiological observations. The finding that estimates of variability obtained by the normal-plus-uniform mixture method are bounded from above leads us to reevaluate previous studies that interpreted a saturation in width of the normal component as evidence for fundamental limits on the precision of perception, working memory and long-term memory.

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“…In this study, we examine whether sustained and spatial attention exert distinct or common influences on long-term memory encoding using behavioral and neural signatures. To measure long-term memory behavior with high sensitivity, we employed a continuous report task, in which participants report a particular dimension of a stimulus along a continuous space (Biderman et al, 2019;J. E. Fan & Turk-Browne, 2016;Richter et al, 2016;Sutterer & Awh, 2016;Tompary et al, 2020;Xie et al, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sustained attention and spatial attention distinctly influence long-term memory encoding

deBettencourt

Williams

Vogel

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Our attention is critically important for what we remember. Prior measures of the relationship between attention and memory, however, have largely treated “attention” as a monolith. Here, across three experiments, we provide evidence for two dissociable aspects of attention that influence encoding into long-term memory. Using spatial cues together with a sensitive continuous report procedure, we find that long-term memory response error is affected by both trial-by-trial fluctuations of sustained attention and prioritization via covert spatial attention. Furthermore, using multivariate analyses of EEG, we track both sustained attention and spatial attention prior to stimulus onset. Intriguingly, even during moments of low sustained attention, there is no decline in the representation of the spatially attended location, showing that these two aspects of attention have robust but independent effects on long term memory encoding. Finally, sustained and spatial attention predicted distinct variance in long-term memory performance across individuals. That is, the relationship between attention and long-term memory suggests a composite model, wherein distinct attentional subcomponents influence encoding into long-term memory. These results point towards a taxonomy of the distinct attentional processes that constrain our memories.

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Working Memory Has Better Fidelity Than Long-Term Memory: The Fidelity Constraint Is Not a General Property of Memory After All

Cited by 14 publications

References 44 publications

Age differences in the precision of memory at short and long delays.

Age differences in the precision of memory at short and long delays.

Theory of neural coding predicts an upper bound on estimates of memory variability.

Sustained attention and spatial attention distinctly influence long-term memory encoding

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