Is working memory inherently more “precise” than long-term memory? Extremely high fidelity visual long-term memories for frequently encountered objects.

Abstract

33Long-term memory is often considered easily corruptible, imprecise and inaccurate, especially in 34 comparison to working memory. However, most research used to support these findings relies on 35 weak long-term memories: those where people have had only one brief exposure to an item. Here 36 we investigated the fidelity of visual long-term memory in more naturalistic setting, with 37 repeated exposures, and ask how it compares to visual working memory fidelity. Using 38 psychophysical methods designed to precisely measure the fidelity of visual memory, we 39 demonstrate that long-term memory for the color of frequently seen objects is as accurate as 40 working memory for the color of a single item seen 1 second ago. In particular, we show that 41 repetition greatly improves long-term memory, including the ability to discriminate an item from 42 a very similar item ('fidelity'), in both a lab setting (Exps. 1-3) and a naturalistic setting (brand 43 logos, Exp. 4). Overall our results demonstrate the impressive nature of visual long-term memory 44 fidelity, which we find is even higher fidelity than previously indicated in situations involving 45 repetitions. Furthermore, our results suggest that there is no distinction between the fidelity of 46 visual working memory and visual long-term memory, but instead both memory systems are 47 capable of storing similar incredibly high fidelity memories under the right circumstances. Our 48 results also provide further evidence that there is no fundamental distinction between the 49 'precision' of memory and the 'likelihood of retrieving a memory', instead suggesting a single 50 continuous measure of memory strength best accounts for working and long-term memory. 51 52 53 Miner, Schurgin, Brady: Repetition and long-term memory fidelity 2 Public Significance Statement 54Visual working memory appears to be based on persistence of perceptual representations in 55 visual cortex. By contrast, visual long-term memory depends critically on semantically 56 meaningful stimuli and is organized by categories and concepts. Does this mean visual long-term 57 memory is fundamentally incapable of storing as precise perceptual information as visual 58 working memory? In the current work, we show that after being shown multiple repetitions of 59 the same item, visual long-term memory can represent incredibly precise visual details. In fact, 60 after just 8 repetitions, visual long-term memory can be as precise as our very best visual 61 working memories. This provides evidence that there is not a fundamental distinction between 62 the fidelity of visual working memory and visual long-term memory. 63 64 Keywords: visual long-term memory; visual working memory; repetition; memory fidelity; 65 memory capacity 66 Miner, Schurgin, Brady: Repetition and long-term memory fidelity 3 Humans have remarkable visual long-term memory abilities, capable of storing thousands of 67 items (Standing, Conezio & Hyber, 1970) with high fidelity (Brady, Konkle, Alvarez & Oliva, 682008). Thus, while working...

Verbal descriptions improve visual working memory but have limited impact on visual long-term memory.

“…Experiment 2 showed that repetitions improved delayed recall, substantially increasing the probability of continuous information storage and its precision. These results corroborate the findings of Miner et al (2020), indicating that representations in long-term memory can also have high fidelity provided that multiple traces of the object have been stored.…”

“…Furthermore, performance in the second presentation of the colored object in the labeling condition would imply four retrievals (two in the first trial + two in the second trial), and hence it should have been even better than performance in the third repetition in the suppression condition. Experiment 2 showed, however, that performance improved linearly with the number of repetitions in visual working memory irrespective of labeling (see also Miner et al, 2020). This is inconsistent with the possibility that labeling benefits visual working memory through retrieval practice.…”

“…This repetition effect, also known as the Hebb effect , consists of the observation of better recall for memory lists as a direct function of the number of times the list was repeated during the course of the experiment. Recently, Miner et al (2020) showed that visual long-term memory for colored objects can be improved by item repetitions, reaching visual working memory levels if the objects are restudied eight times.…”

“…In Experiment 2, we repeated the presentation of the memoranda three times, and this improved performance overall over the short and long term (see also Miner et al, 2020). The repetition benefit was reflected in all parameters of the mixture model: The number of categorical and continuous representations stored increased, and memory imprecision decreased.…”

“…This task has been used to examine changes in the accessibility and precision of features of a small set of objects maintained in visual working memory in comparison to the features of hundreds of objects stored in long-term memory (Biderman et al, 2019;Brady et al, 2013). Biderman et al (2019) showed that both memory precision and the probability of memory retrieval were higher when information was maintained in visual working memory than in long-term memory (see also Miner et al, 2020). This shows that visual working memory maintenance confers higher accessibility and fidelity to visual representations.…”