Are all real‐world objects created equal? Estimating the “set‐size” of the search target in visual working memory

Abstract

Are all real-world objects created equal? Visual search difficulty increases with the number of targets and as target-related visual working memory (VWM) load increases. Our goal was to investigate the load imposed by individual real-world objects held in VWM in the context of search. Measures of visual clutter attempt to quantify real-world set-size in the context of scenes. We applied one of these measures, the number of proto-objects, to individual real-world objects and used contralateral delay activity (CDA) to measure the resulting VWM load. The current study presented a real-world object as a target cue, followed by a delay where CDA was measured. This was followed by a four-object search array. We compared CDA and later search performance from target cues containing a high or low number of proto-objects. High proto-object target cues resulted in greater CDA, longer search RTs, target dwell times, and reduced search guidance, relative to low proto-object targets. These findings demonstrate that targets with more proto-objects result in a higher VWM load and reduced search performance. This shows that the number of proto-objects contained within individual objects produce set-size like effects in VWM and suggests proto-objects may be a viable unit of measure of real-world VWM load. Importantly, this demonstrates that not all real-world objects are created equal.

Individual differences in working memory reactivation of long-term memories predict protection against anticipated interference

“…While there was a robust CDA in both conditions, its amplitude was about half of what was observed in the literature for novel items (cf. Brady et al, 2016;Carlisle et al, 2011;Miuccio et al, 2022;Schmidt & Zelinsky, 2017;Williams & Drew, 2021). Rather the amplitude we obtained is more similar to conditions that have been suggested to benefit from LTM aid such as the same information being stored repeatedly or after a study session as in the present study (Carlisle et al, 2011;Schurgin et al, 2018).…”

“…To calculate the minimum number of participants needed, we estimated the effect size by averaging the effect sizes across five studies that analyzed the CDA for working memory maintenance (Adam et al, 2018;Hakim et al, 2019Hakim et al, , 2020Miuccio et al, 2022). We carried out a sequential design approach by following the guidelines of Dienes (2021) and Schönbrodt and Wagenmakers (2018) with the associated R package made available by Schönbrodt and Stefan (2019) (github.com/nicebread/BFDA).…”

Individual Differences in Working Memory Reactivation of Long-Term Memories Predict Protection Against Anticipated Interference

“…To calculate the minimum number of participants needed, we estimated the effect size by averaging the effect sizes across five studies that analyzed the CDA for working memory maintenance (Adam et al, 2018;Hakim et al, 2019Hakim et al, , 2020Miuccio et al, 2022). We carried out a sequential design approach by following the guidelines of Dienes (2021) and Schönbrodt and Wagenmakers (2018) with the associated R package made available by Schönbrodt and Stefan (2019) (github.com/nicebread/BFDA).…”

Can templates-for-rejection suppress real-world affective objects in visual search?

“…The changes made to Experiment 2a were 1) the increase in the cue presentation time from 200ms to 400ms to facilitate encoding of the visually complex and varied multidimensional distractor stimuli, based on the design of previous investigations assessing VWM storage of real-world imagery (Miuccio et al, 2022;Hu & Jacobs, 2021); 2) the removal of the Target template condition to allow exploration of the template-for-rejection effect isolated from target cueing effects; 3) the addition of a salient non-object shape distractor to isolate the relative effect of templates-for-rejection on real-world objects versus non-object stimuli.…”