Variability in the quality of visual working memory

Fougnie, Daryl; Suchow, Jordan W.; Alvarez, George A.

doi:10.1038/ncomms2237

Cited by 237 publications

(440 citation statements)

References 35 publications

(55 reference statements)

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“…Instead, such debates may well represent aspects of visual arrays performance that function along side attention control. Similar to a recent argument that random degradation of maintained items accounts for a least a portion performance (Fougnie, Suchow, & Alverez, 2012), we believe that visual arrays performance (and working memory in general; Shipstead et al, 2014;Unsworth et al, 2014) can no longer be parsimoniously accounted through one mechanism.…”

Section: Multiple Mechanisms Of Visual Arrays Performancesupporting

confidence: 74%

Working memory capacity and the scope and control of attention

Shipstead

Harrison

Engle

2015

Atten Percept Psychophys

111

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Complex span and visual arrays are two common measures of working memory capacity that are respectively treated as measures of attention control and storage capacity. A recent analysis of these tasks concluded that (1) complex span performance has a relatively stronger relationship to fluid intelligence and (2) this is due to the requirement that people engage control processes while performing this task. The present study examines the validity of these conclusions by examining two large data sets that include a more diverse set of visual arrays tasks and several measures of attention control. We conclude that complex span and visual arrays account for similar amounts of variance in fluid intelligence. The disparity relative to the earlier analysis is attributed to the present study involving a more complete measure of the latent ability underlying the performance of visual arrays. Moreover, we find that both types of working memory task have strong relationships to attention control. This indicates that the ability to engage attention in a controlled manner is a critical aspect of working memory capacity, regardless of the type of task that is used to measure this construct.

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Section: Multiple Mechanisms Of Visual Arrays Performancesupporting

confidence: 74%

Working memory capacity and the scope and control of attention

Shipstead

Harrison

Engle

2015

Atten Percept Psychophys

111

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“…There was no significant difference in the quality with which the locations were stored, with SD estimates for novels 10.0 , and 9.7 for standards, t(15) = 0.53, p = .606 ( Figure 4B, right). However, we note that such a model can have more power to detect differences in guessing than precision (Fougnie, Suchow, & Alvarez, 2012;Suchow, Fougnie, Brady, & Alvarez, 2014), and there were only 72 novels. Yet Monte Carlo simulations showed that with this number of subjects and this number of trials per condition, we would have 91% power to detect a SD change as small as one degree.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 93%

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

et al. 2017

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Data Files: Raw data and analysis scripts are at OSF URL https://osf.io/g9pvd/ Acknowledgements: The authors thank Fabrice Parmentier and Sirawaj Itthiipuripat for helpful advice on task design, and Francesco Marini for programming. This research was funded by a grant from NIH (R21 NS085543), and the James S McDonnell (#220020375). 2 AbstractWhen a unexpected event, such as a car honking, occurs in daily life, it often disrupts our train of thought. In the lab, this effect was recently modeled with a task in which verbal working memory (WM) was disrupted by unexpected auditory events (Wessel et al., 2016). Here, we tested whether this effect extends to a different type of WM, viz. visuomotor. We found that unexpected auditory events similarly decremented visuomotor WM. Moreover, this effect persisted for many more trials than previously shown, and the effect occurred for two types of unexpected auditory event. Furthermore, we found that unexpected events decremented WM by decreasing the quantity, but not necessarily the quality, of the items stored. These studies show a statistically robust, and across-time enduring, impact of unexpected events on visuomotor WM. They also show an increase of guessing, consistent with a neuroscience-inspired theory that unexpected events 'wipe out' WM by stopping the ongoing maintenance of the trace.

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“…Namely, resource models conceptualize working memory as a limited pool of resources that must be allocated across all (task-relevant) items -as the proportion of resources allocated to each item decreases, the precision or fidelity of those representations decrease (Bays, Catalao, & Husain, 2009;Bays & Husain, 2008;Huang, 2010;van den Berg, Shin, Chou, George, & Ma, 2012). Importantly, the precision of the maintained representations can vary between items (Fougnie, Suchow, & Alvarez, 2012), trials (van den Berg et al, 2012), by the allocation of attention (Gorgoraptis, Catalao, Bays, & Husain, 2011), and may be under cognitive control (Machizawa, Goh, & Driver, 2012), such that precision and the number of items maintained can be traded off against each other (Roggeman, Klingberg, Feenstra, Compte, & Almeida, 2014). Consequently, although the processing of irrelevant information would reduce the amount of resources allocated to task-relevant information, preparatory activity that is associated with filtering may also be related to VWM performance through the efficient processing of relevant (target) information (e.g., by selectively enhancing the precision of target items through the allocation of resources).…”

Section: General Discussion: Does the Bouncer Need A Raise?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Re-evaluating the relationships among filtering activity, unnecessary storage, and visual working memory capacity

Emrich

Busseri

2015

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

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The amount of task-irrelevant information encoded in visual working memory (VWM), referred to as unnecessary storage, has been proposed as a potential mechanism underlying individual differences in VWM capacity. In addition, a number of studies have provided evidence for additional activity that initiates the filtering process originating in the frontal cortex and basal ganglia, and is therefore a crucial step in the link between unnecessary storage and VWM capacity. Here, we re-examine data from two prominent studies that identified unnecessary storage activity as a predictor of VWM capacity by directly testing the implied path model linking filtering-related activity, unnecessary storage, and VWM capacity. Across both studies, we found that unnecessary storage was not a significant predictor of individual differences in VWM capacity once activity associated with filtering was accounted for; instead, activity associated with filtering better explained variation in VWM capacity. These findings suggest that unnecessary storage is not a limiting factor in VWM performance, whereas neural activity associated with filtering may play a more central role in determining VWM performance that goes beyond preventing unnecessary storage.Keywords Working memory . Attention . ERP . Short-term memory . fMRIOver the past few decades, there has been enormous interest in understanding the nature of visual working memory (VWM), which enables the on-line maintenance of a limited amount of visual information over short periods of time. In particular, a number of studies have focused on understanding the origins of individual differences in VWM capacity (Luck & Vogel, 2013). That is, VWM has a limited bandwidth, and as such, the number of items (capacity) and/or the fidelity of information stored in VWM appear to be severely limited, with significant individual differences in this ability.Although the precise origins of individual differences in VWM capacity remains unclear, one mechanism that has been proposed to account for these differences is the ability to efficiently allocate limited capacity resources through the filtering of unnecessary (distractor) information, thereby minimizing the unnecessary storage of task-irrelevant information (Awh & Vogel, 2008;Luck & Vogel, 2013). Specifically, if VWM is characterized as having a limited number of storage Bslots,t hen any item that is encoded into VWM will occupy one of these storage units. According to this model, the more control you have over which information gains access to VWM, the less likely you are to encode task-irrelevant information that will occupy these limited storage slots, thereby freeing up these resources for the task-relevant items. This efficient allocation of capacity-limited resources has been linked to VWM capacity, as shown by a positive correlation between measures of filtering efficiency and VWM capacity (Vogel, Mccollough, & Machizawa, 2005). From this perspective, filtering efficiency can be indexed by the amount of unnecessary activity -that is,...

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Variability in the quality of visual working memory

Cited by 237 publications

References 35 publications

Working memory capacity and the scope and control of attention

Working memory capacity and the scope and control of attention

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

Re-evaluating the relationships among filtering activity, unnecessary storage, and visual working memory capacity

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