Time manages interference in visual short-term memory

Abstract

Emerging evidence suggests that age-related declines in memory may reflect a failure in pattern separation, a process that is believed to reduce the encoding overlap between similar stimulus representations during memory encoding. Indeed, behavioural pattern separation may be indexed by a visual continuous recognition task in which items are presented in sequence and observers report for each whether it is novel, previously viewed (old), or whether it shares features with a previously viewed item (similar). In comparison to young adults, older adults show a decreased pattern separation when the number of items between 'old' and 'similar' items is increased. Yet the mechanisms of forgetting underpinning this type of recognition task are yet to be explored in a cognitively homogenous group, with careful control over the parameters of the task, including elapsing time (a critical variable in models of forgetting). By extending the inter-item intervals, number of intervening items, and overall decay interval, we observed in a young adult sample (N=35, Mage=19.56years) that the critical factor governing performance was inter-item interval. We argue that tasks using behavioural continuous recognition to index pattern separation in immediate memory will benefit from generous inter-item spacing, offering protection from inter-item interference.

Time-dependent forgetting in visual short-term memory

“…The distractor was placed half way into the retention interval and this arrangement allowed ample time to consolidate the representation, increasing its resilience to distraction. Smith, McKeown, and Bunce (2017) have shown that extending the interval between successive images in a visual recognition task improves performance and Ricker and Cowan (2014) argue that forgetting is greatly reduced when there is sufficient time to consolidate the items into memory.…”