New perspectives on binding in visual working memory

Schneegans, Sebastian; Bays, Paul M.

doi:10.1111/bjop.12345

Cited by 67 publications

(96 citation statements)

References 188 publications

(287 reference statements)

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“…Also, the demonstrated flexibility of human subjects to re-combine information at different levels of the representational hierarchy has implications for our general understanding of visual working memory. While previous results suggest that working memory representations are tightly linked across different levels of a hierarchical stimulus representations (see review 28 ) our findings show that these links remain sufficiently flexible at the time of recall.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 68%

Categorical judgments do not modify sensory information in working memory

Luu

Stocker

2020

Preprint

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Categorical judgments can systematically bias the perceptual interpretation of stimulus features.However, it remained unclear whether categorical judgments directly modify working memory representations or, alternatively, generate these biases via an inference process down-stream from working memory. To address this question we ran two novel psychophysical experiments in which human subjects had to revert their categorical judgments about a stimulus feature, if incorrect based on feedback, before providing an estimate of the feature. If categorical judgments indeed directly altered sensory representations in working memory, subjects' estimates should reflect some aspects of their initial (incorrect) categorical judgment in those trials.We found no traces of the initial categorical judgment. Rather, subjects seem to be able to flexibly switch their categorical judgment if needed and use the correct corresponding categorical prior to properly perform feature inference. A cross-validated model comparison also revealed that feedback may lead to selective memory recall such that only memory samples that are consistent with the categorical judgment are accepted for the inference process. Our results suggest that categorical judgments do not modify sensory information in working memory but rather act as top-down expectation in the subsequent sensory recall and inference process down-stream from working memory.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 68%

Categorical judgments do not modify sensory information in working memory

Luu

Stocker

2020

Preprint

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“…This suggests that in contrast to color, spatial and serial position are more automatically integrated into an object representation, which reflects the importance of spatiotemporal information for object definitions 1 . Specifically, the serial position of an item defines the temporal structure of a trial, which might be particularly crucial in the case of sequentially presented items at the same spatial position 21 . The observed influence of spatial position is in line with previous studies demonstrating a spatial tuning of serial dependence 3,[22][23][24] .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Context information supports serial dependence of multiple visual objects across memory episodes

et al. 2020

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Serial dependence is thought to promote perceptual stability by compensating for small changes of an object's appearance across memory episodes. So far, it has been studied in situations that comprised only a single object. The question of how we selectively create temporal stability of several objects remains unsolved. In a memory task, objects can be differentiated by their to-be-memorized feature (content) as well as accompanying discriminative features (context). We test whether congruent context features, in addition to content similarity, support serial dependence. In four experiments, we observe a stronger serial dependence between objects that share the same context features across trials. Apparently, the binding of content and context features is not erased but rather carried over to the subsequent memory episode. As this reflects temporal dependencies in natural settings, our findings reveal a mechanism that integrates corresponding content and context features to support stable representations of individualized objects over time.

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“…Table provides a summary of our model‐fitting results; the models and the fitting procedure are detailed in Appendix B. In addition to one instantiation of a pure‐item model and an item‐plus‐ensemble model, we also built a model that explains some of the gap between hit rate and localization rate by swaps of colours between items in VWM (Bays, ; Schneegans & Bays, ; Bays, Wu, & Husain, ), instead of ensemble representations. The item‐plus‐ensemble model fits the average performance data best (cumulative deviation: 0.03), with only a slight underestimation of the localization rate on miss trials.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Two good reasons to say ‘change!’ – ensemble representations as well as item representations impact standard measures of VWM capacity

Liesefeld

Müller

2018

British J of Psychology

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Visual working memory (VWM) is a central bottleneck in human information processing. Its capacity is most often measured in terms of how many individual-item representations VWM can hold (k). In the standard task employed to estimate k, an array of highly discriminable colour patches is maintained and, after a short retention interval, compared to a test display (change detection). Recent research has shown that with more complex, structured displays, change-detection performance is, in addition to individual-item representations, supported by ensemble representations formed as a result of spatial subgroupings. Here, by asking participants to additionally localize the change, we reveal indication for an influence of ensemble representations even in the very simple, unstructured displays of the colour-patch change-detection task. Critically, pure-item models from which standard formulae of k are derived do not consider ensemble representations and, therefore, potentially overestimate k. To gauge this overestimation, we develop an item-plus-ensemble model of change detection and change localization. Estimates of k from this new model are about 1 item (~30%) lower than the estimates from traditional pure-item models, even if derived from the same data sets.

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New perspectives on binding in visual working memory

Cited by 67 publications

References 188 publications

Categorical judgments do not modify sensory information in working memory

Categorical judgments do not modify sensory information in working memory

Context information supports serial dependence of multiple visual objects across memory episodes

Two good reasons to say ‘change!’ – ensemble representations as well as item representations impact standard measures of VWM capacity

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