A single, simple, statistical mechanism explains resource distribution and temporal updating in visual short-term memory
| Autor: | Philip L. Smith, Simon D. Lilburn |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
Linguistics and Language
Visual perception Computer science Resource distribution Experimental and Cognitive Psychology Stimulus (physiology) 050105 experimental psychology 03 medical and health sciences 0302 clinical medicine Discrimination Psychological Square root Artificial Intelligence Orientation Developmental and Educational Psychology Humans 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Attention Visual short-term memory Working memory 05 social sciences Sampling theory Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology Memory Short-Term Perceptual integration Pattern Recognition Visual Visual Perception 030217 neurology & neurosurgery Cognitive psychology |
| Zdroj: | Cognitive psychology. 122 |
| ISSN: | 1095-5623 |
| Popis: | Investigations into the way that information is held and integrated within the visual system provides some basis for understanding how visual information is represented and processed. Just over sixty years ago, Swets, Shipley, McKey, and Green (1959) demonstrated that performance within an auditory detection task increases as a function of the square root of the number of stimulus observation intervals, following the predictions of basic sampling theory, indicating the efficient perceptual integration of stimulus information. This principle of observer performance contingent on a constant rate of stimulus sampling also forms the basis of the sample-size model (Palmer, 1990; Sewell, Lilburn, & Smith, 2014) which seeks to provide an account of how memory resources might be divided among item representations in visual short-term memory (VSTM). In this article, we combine the multiple observations paradigm of Swets and colleagues with the VSTM paradigm of Sewell and colleagues and show that the sample-size relationship accounts for both the increase in performance with the number of presentation intervals and the way that performance changes as a function of the number of items in memory. The model provides an account of both the overall information limit of VSTM and an account of the dynamics of that limit, demonstrating not only that observers can selectively update specific representations in memory but that performance in this task is accounted for by a simple statistical constraint. We discuss the implications for models of VSTM capacity and architecture generally, focusing on the implications for objecthood and the characteristics of encoding to and retrieval from memory. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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