Evidence of gradual loss of precision for simple features and complex objects in visual working memory

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance
Rosanne L RademakerFrank Tong

Abstract

Previous studies have suggested that people can maintain prioritized items in visual working memory for many seconds, with negligible loss of information over time. Such findings imply that working memory representations are robust to the potential contaminating effects of internal noise. However, once visual information is encoded into working memory, one might expect it to inevitably begin degrading over time, as this actively maintained information is no longer tethered to the original perceptual input. Here, we examined this issue by evaluating working memory for single central presentations of an oriented grating, color patch, or face stimulus, across a range of delay periods (1, 3, 6, or 12 s). We applied a mixture-model analysis to distinguish changes in memory precision over time from changes in the frequency of outlier responses that resemble random guesses. For all 3 types of stimuli, participants exhibited a clear and consistent decline in the precision of working memory as a function of temporal delay, as well as a modest increase in guessing-related responses for colored patches and face stimuli. We observed a similar loss of precision over time while controlling for temporal distinctiveness. Our results demonstrat...Continue Reading

Citations

Jan 12, 2019·Journal of Vision·Chaipat ChunharasJohn T Serences
Jul 3, 2019·Nature Neuroscience·Rosanne L RademakerJohn T Serences
Mar 3, 2020·PLoS Biology·Michael J WolffMark G Stokes
Jul 31, 2019·Nature Communications·Matthew F PanichelloTimothy J Buschman
Feb 26, 2020·Brain Sciences·Héctor A Cepeda-FreyreCarmen Cortes
Aug 4, 2020·Infancy : the Official Journal of the International Society on Infant Studies·Koraly Pérez-EdgarVanessa LoBue
Aug 19, 2020·Psychonomic Bulletin & Review·Nicole HakimEdward K Vogel
May 20, 2019·Neuron·Flora Bouchacourt, Timothy J Buschman
Jul 16, 2021·Scientific Reports·Linjing Jiang, Hoi-Chung Leung
Aug 11, 2021·Memory & Cognition·Cristiano Moraes BilacchiRaymundo Machado de Azevedo Neto

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