Contrary to our rich phenomenological visual experience, our visual short-term memory system can maintain representations of only three to four objects at any given moment. For over a century, the capacity of visual memory has been shown to vary substantially across individuals, ranging from 1.5 to about 5 objects. Although numerous studies have recently begun to characterize the neural substrates of visual memory processes, a neurophysiological index of storage capacity limitations has not yet been established. Here, we provide electrophysiological evidence for lateralized activity in humans that reflects the encoding and maintenance of items in visual memory. The amplitude of this activity is strongly modulated by the number of objects being held in the memory at the time, but approaches a limit asymptotically for arrays that meet or exceed storage capacity. Indeed, the precise limit is determined by each individual's memory capacity, such that the activity from low-capacity individuals reaches this plateau much sooner than that from high-capacity individuals. Consequently, this measure provides a strong neurophysiological predictor of an individual's capacity, allowing the demonstration of a direct relationship between neural activity and memory capacity.

The capacity of visual short-term memory is highly limited, maintaining only three to four objects simultaneously. This extreme limitation necessitates efficient mechanisms to select only the most relevant objects from the immediate environment to be represented in memory and to restrict irrelevant items from consuming capacity. Here we report a neurophysiological measure of this memory selection mechanism in humans that gauges an individual's efficiency at excluding irrelevant items from being stored in memory. By examining the moment-by-moment contents of visual memory, we observe that selection efficiency varies substantially across individuals and is strongly predicted by the particular memory capacity of each person. Specifically, high capacity individuals are much more efficient at representing only the relevant items than are low capacity individuals, who inefficiently encode and maintain information about the irrelevant items present in the display. These results provide evidence that under many circumstances low capacity individuals may actually store more information in memory than high capacity individuals. Indeed, this ancillary allocation of memory capacity to irrelevant objects may be a primary source of putative differences in overall storage capacity.

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Overlearning refers to the continued training of a skill after performance improvement has plateaued. Whether overlearning is beneficial is a question in our daily lives that has never been clearly answered. Here, we report a new important role: Overlearning abruptly changes neurochemical processing to hyper-stabilize and protect trained perceptual learning from subsequent new learning. Usually, learning immediately after training is so unstable that it can be disrupted by subsequent new learning, unless waiting for passive stabilization, which takes hours. However, overlearning so rapidly and strongly stabilizes the learning state that it not only becomes resilient against, but disrupts, subsequent new learning. Such hyper-stabilization is associated with an abrupt shift from glutamate-dominant excitatory to gamma-aminobutyric-acid-dominant inhibitory processing in early visual areas. Hyper-stabilization contrasts with passive and slower stabilization, which is associated with a mere reduction of an excitatory dominance to baseline levels. Utilizing hyper-stabilization may lead to efficient learning paradigms.

It has been debated whether human visual working memory is limited by the number of items or the precision with which they are represented. In the research reported here, we show that the precision of working memory can be flexibly and willfully controlled, but only if the number of retained items is low. Electroencephalographic recordings revealed that a neural marker for visual working memory (contralateral delay activity, or CDA) that is known to increase in amplitude with the number of retained items was also affected by the precision with which items were retained. However, willfully enhanced precision increased CDA amplitude only when the number of retained items was low. These results show that both the number and the (willfully controlled) precision of retained items constrain visual working memory: People can enhance the precision of their visual working memory, but only for a few items.

Using appropriate stimuli to evoke emotions is especially important for researching emotion. Psychologists have provided several standardized affective stimulus databases-such as the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) and the Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS) as visual stimulus databases, as well as the International Affective Digitized Sounds (IADS) and the Montreal Affective Voices as auditory stimulus databases for emotional experiments. However, considering the limitations of the existing auditory stimulus database studies, research using auditory stimuli is relatively limited compared with the studies using visual stimuli. First, the number of sample sounds is limited, making it difficult to equate across emotional conditions and semantic categories. Second, some artificially created materials (music or human voice) may fail to accurately drive the intended emotional processes. Our principal aim was to expand existing auditory affective sample database to sufficiently cover natural sounds. We asked 207 participants to rate 935 sounds (including the sounds from the IADS-2) using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) and three basic-emotion rating scales. The results showed that emotions in sounds can be distinguished on the affective rating scales, and the stability of the evaluations of sounds revealed that we have successfully provided a larger corpus of natural, emotionally evocative auditory stimuli, covering a wide range of semantic categories. Our expanded, standardized sound sample database may promote a wide range of research in auditory systems and the possible interactions with other sensory modalities, encouraging direct reliable comparisons of outcomes from different researchers in the field of psychology.

Human neuroimaging studies have implicated a number of brain regions in long-term memory formation. Foremost among these is ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Here, we used double-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to assess whether the contribution of this part of cortex is crucial for laying down new memories and, if so, to examine the time course of this process. Healthy adult volunteers performed an incidental encoding task (living/nonliving judgments) on sequences of words. In separate series, the task was performed either on its own or while TMS was applied to one of two sites of experimental interest (left/right anterior inferior frontal gyrus) or a control site (vertex). TMS pulses were delivered at 350, 750, or 1,150 ms following word onset. After a delay of 15 min, memory for the items was probed with a recognition memory test including confidence judgments. TMS to all three sites nonspecifically affected the speed and accuracy with which judgments were made during the encoding task. However, only TMS to prefrontal cortex affected later memory performance. Stimulation of left or right inferior frontal gyrus at all three time points reduced the likelihood that a word would later be recognized by a small, but significant, amount (∼4%). These findings indicate that bilateral ventrolateral prefrontal cortex plays an essential role in memory formation, exerting its influence between ≥350 and 1,150 ms after an event is encountered.

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