The contents of visual working memory delay the perceived offset of matching visual stimuli

Pan, Yi; Zhang, Zheyu; Zuo, Wangmeng

doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2019.102954

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…The present finding that visual working memory degrades visual temporal resolution is also consistent with recent evidence suggesting that the nontemporal content of visual working memory modulates the temporal processing of a matching visual stimulus by prolonging the perception of stimulus duration (Pan & Luo, 2012), by delaying the perception of stimulus offset (Pan et al, 2019), and by accelerating the perception of stimulus onset (Hollingworth et al, 2013). All these perceptual outcomes could be accounted for by the enhanced neural responses to visual stimuli that match visual working memory representations.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Visual working memory modulates the temporal resolution of visual perception

Pan

2020

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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The present study examined how visual working memory affects temporal resolution of visual stimuli that match the memorised nontemporal information about stimulus features (e.g., shapes). The results show that active maintenance of a sample shape in visual working memory impaired the concurrent detection of a sufficiently brief temporal gap within a matching visual target stimulus. The impairment of temporal gap detection was not likely due to the mechanism of visual priming from the presentation of the sample shape, because there was no evidence for priming effects when the sample was only passively viewed without working memory demands or when the sample was initially encoded into memory but did not need to be actively maintained in mind by the time the target stimulus appeared. These findings demonstrate that visual working memory can lower the temporal resolution of visual perception and thereby impair performance in the temporal gap detection task that requires fine temporal segregation of visual information, and they suggest the existence of a previously unknown downside to the interplay between working memory and visual perception.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Visual working memory modulates the temporal resolution of visual perception

Pan

2020

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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“…A key characteristic of the present experimental design is that it allows us to distinguish between passive priming effects and working memory effects in a single task paradigm, while controlling for depth of stimulus encoding and cognitive control load across different conditions (cf. Pan, Han, & Zuo, 2019;Pan, Zhang, & Zuo, 2019). If priming a stimulus representation facilitates subsequent target discrimination, then we should expect that target discrimination would benefit when the stimulus containing a Landolt target matched the uncued sample compared to when it matched neither sample.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual working memory enhances target discrimination accuracy with single-item displays

Pan

Zhang

2020

Atten Percept Psychophys

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The maintenance of information in visual working memory has been shown to bias the concurrent processing in favor of matching visual input. The present study aimed to examine whether this bias can act at an early stage of processing to enhance target feature perception in single-item displays. Participants were sequentially presented with two distinct colored stimuli as memory samples and a retro-cue indicating which of the two samples should be maintained for subsequent memory test. During the retention interval, they had to discriminate the gap orientation of a Landolt target presented through a single visual stimulus that could match one or neither of the two samples. Across two experiments, we consistently found that discrimination performance was more accurate when the Landolt target was situated within a stimulus that matched the sample being retained in visual working memory, as compared with when the target was not. This effect cannot be attributed to the mechanism of passive priming, because we failed to observe priming effects when the stimulus containing the target matched the sample that was retrocued to be irrelevant to the working memory task, as compared to when the stimulus matched neither sample. Given the fact that target stimuli were presented in single-item displays wherein external noise was precluded, the present findings demonstrate that the working memory bias of visual attention operating in the absence of stimulus competition facilitates early perceptual processing at the attended location via signal enhancement.

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