The impact of interference on short-term memory for visual orientation.

Abstract

Visual short-term memory serves as an efficient buffer for maintaining no longer directly accessible information. How robust are visual memories against interference? Memory for simple visual features has proven vulnerable to distractors containing conflicting information along the relevant stimulus dimension, leading to the idea that interacting feature-specific channels at an early stage of visual processing support memory for simple visual features. Here we showed that memory for a single randomly orientated grating was susceptible to interference from a to-be-ignored distractor grating presented midway through a 3-s delay period. Memory for the initially presented orientation became noisier when it differed from the distractor orientation, and response distributions were shifted toward the distractor orientation (by ∼3°). Interestingly, when the distractor was rendered task-relevant by making it a second memory target, memory for both retained orientations showed reduced reliability as a function of increased orientation differences between them. However, the degree to which responses to the first grating shifted toward the orientation of the task-relevant second grating was much reduced. Finally, using a dichoptic display, we demonstrated that these systematic biases caused by a consciously perceived distractor disappeared once the distractor was presented outside of participants' awareness. Together, our results show that visual short-term memory for orientation can be systematically biased by interfering information that is consciously perceived.

Simultaneous representation of sensory and mnemonic information in human visual cortex

“…9). This finding is in line with behavioral and neuroimaging demonstrations showing higher fidelity memory recall for similar targets and distractors (Rademaker, Bloem, De Weerd, & Sack, 2015;Lorenc, Sreenivasan, Nee, Vandenbroucke, & D'Esposito, 2018; Supplementary Fig. 2).…”

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Unexpected events disrupt visuomotor working memory and increase guessing

“…visual) 'shapes' the (visual) WM representation (Ester, Zilber, & Serences, 2015;Hakun & Ravizza, 2016;Rademaker, Bloem, De Weerd, & Sack, 2015;Yoon, et al, 2006) (however, see Awh, Vogel, & Oh, 2006;Cools, Miyakawa, Sheridan, & D'Esposito, 2010;Ester, et al, 2015;Gazzaley, Cooney, Rissman, & D'Esposito, 2005;McNab & Klingberg, 2008;Zanto & Gazzaley, 2009). Yet in the real world, distraction is often in a different modality than the target information (e.g.…”

Interactions between visual working memory representations

“…Third, recent studies have found evidence that WM contains group-level information – such as statistical summary information – along with item-level information (Brady & Alvarez, 2011; 2015; Orhan & Jacobs, 2012). Fourth, WM representations are vulnerable to inference from other simultaneously stored information (Huang & Sekuler, 2010; Radenmaker, Bloem, Weerd, & Sack, 2015; Oberauer & Lin, 2017). Together, these findings question the common assumption of independence and suggest that individual items might interact in WM.…”

“…In particular, the interactions observed in most of these studies may have occurred during perception rather than reflecting interactions between WM representations per se. In other words, when multiple items are presented simultaneously, this might lead to distortions of perception or the extraction of summary properties, which are then carried forward into WM (e.g., Brady & Alvarez, 2011; 2015; Clevenger & Hummel, 2013; Orhan & Jacobs, 2013; Jiang, Olson, & Chun, 2000; Woodman, Vecera, & Luck, 2003; Xu, 2006; Xu & Chun, 2007; but see Huang & Sekuler, 2010; Kang & Choi, 2015; Rademaker et al, 2015). Little is known about whether and how visual WM representations interact with each other after the information has been encoded into WM.…”

“…For instance, Rademaker et al (2015) studied distractor interference effects for orientation differences between a target and a distractor within a ±45° range, and Orhan and Jacobs (2013) used an even narrower ±15° range of orientation differences. Observers may learn the range of stimulus differences and adjust their reports accordingly, which could create a bias toward the mean of the learned stimulus range.…”