Accessibility Limits Recall From Visual Working Memory

In this article, we demonstrate limitations of accessibility of information in visual working memory (VWM). Recently, cued-recall has been used to estimate the fidelity of information in VWM, where the feature of a cued object is reproduced from memory (Bays, Catalao, & Husain, 2009; Wilken &...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition memory, and cognition, 2017-09, Vol.43 (9), p.1415-1431
Main Authors: Rajsic, Jason, Swan, Garrett, Wilson, Daryl E, Pratt, Jay
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis of Variance
Cognitive Processes
College Students
Color
Computational Modeling
Computer Simulation
Cues
Error Patterns
Errors
Estimates
Foreign Countries
Free Recall
Human
Humans
Memory
Memory, Short-Term
Mental Recall
Models, Psychological
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Photic Stimulation
Psychological Tests
Recall
Recall (Psychology)
Short Term Memory
Simulation
Spatial Ability
Statistical Analysis
Visual Memory
Visual Perception
Visual Stimuli
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Summary:In this article, we demonstrate limitations of accessibility of information in visual working memory (VWM). Recently, cued-recall has been used to estimate the fidelity of information in VWM, where the feature of a cued object is reproduced from memory (Bays, Catalao, & Husain, 2009; Wilken & Ma, 2004; Zhang & Luck, 2008). Response error in these tasks has been largely studied with respect to failures of encoding and maintenance; however, the retrieval operations used in these tasks remain poorly understood. By varying the number and type of object features provided as a cue in a visual delayed-estimation paradigm, we directly assess the nature of retrieval errors in delayed estimation from VWM. Our results demonstrate that providing additional object features in a single cue reliably improves recall, largely by reducing swap, or misbinding, responses. In addition, performance simulations using the binding pool model (Swan & Wyble, 2014) were able to mimic this pattern of performance across a large span of parameter combinations, demonstrating that the binding pool provides a possible mechanism underlying this pattern of results that is not merely a symptom of one particular parametrization. We conclude that accessing visual working memory is a noisy process, and can lead to errors over and above those of encoding and maintenance limitations.
ISSN:0278-7393
1939-1285
DOI:10.1037/xlm0000387