What can half a million change detection trials tell us about visual working memory?

Balaban, Halely; Fukuda, Keisuke; Luria, Roy

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2019.05.021

Cited by 30 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Although the visual working memory and spatial working memory measures that we used were derived from confirmed paradigms (Luck and Vogel, 1997; and were administered via a validated test battery (https://brainbaseline.com; Lee et al, 2012), the measures did not provide sufficient high-level difficulty for our highfunctioning, young-adult population to produce a large spread in the distribution of scores. At issue is that working memory measures that do not exceed working memory capacity such as those used in this study may be less reliable (Balaban et al, 2019). The fact that we did find consistent, reliable results showing the SPWM ability related to visual search accuracy and N2pc amplitudes and that it is consistent with other related studies attests to the strength of the finding.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 69%

Individual Differences in Working Memory and the N2pc

Couperus

Lydic

Hollis

et al. 2021

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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The lateralized ERP N2pc component has been shown to be an effective marker of attentional object selection when elicited in a visual search task, specifically reflecting the selection of a target item among distractors. Moreover, when targets are known in advance, the visual search process is guided by representations of target features held in working memory at the time of search, thus guiding attention to objects with target-matching features. Previous studies have shown that manipulating working memory availability via concurrent tasks or within task manipulations influences visual search performance and the N2pc. Other studies have indicated that visual (non-spatial) vs. spatial working memory manipulations have differential contributions to visual search. To investigate this the current study assesses participants' visual and spatial working memory ability independent of the visual search task to determine whether such individual differences in working memory affect task performance and the N2pc. Participants (n = 205) completed a visual search task to elicit the N2pc and separate visual working memory (VWM) and spatial working memory (SPWM) assessments. Greater SPWM, but not VWM, ability is correlated with and predicts higher visual search accuracy and greater N2pc amplitudes. Neither VWM nor SPWM was related to N2pc latency. These results provide additional support to prior behavioral and neural visual search findings that spatial WM availability, whether as an ability of the participant's processing system or based on task demands, plays an important role in efficient visual search.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 69%

Individual Differences in Working Memory and the N2pc

Couperus

Lydic

Hollis

et al. 2021

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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“…Data from 'change detection' tasks, frequently used to estimate K, seem to lead to extremely conservative responding in many situations. For example, reanalyzing data from 3,849 people completing a change detection task with 4 items (Balaban, Fukuda & Luria, 2019), shows that 73.4% had false alarm rates below 0.1-the exact area where "K" values and empirically curvilinear ROCs most strongly diverge, and thus the area where K values are most likely to be picking up largely on response criteria differences rather than genuine differences in memory strength.…”

Section: This Has Major Implications For Memory Research and For Societymentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring memory is harder than you think: How to avoid problematic measurement practices in memory research

Tf¹,

Mm²,

Williams³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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There is a crisis of measurement in memory research, with major implications for theory and practice. This crisis arises because of a critical complication present when measuring memory using the recognition memory task that dominates the study of working memory and long-term memory (“did you see this item? yes/no” or “did this item change? yes/no”). Such tasks give two measures of performance, the “hit rate” (how often you say you previously saw an item you actually did previously see) and the “false alarm rate” (how often you say you saw something you never saw). Yet what researchers want is one single, integrated measure of memory performance. Integrating the hit and false alarm rate into a single measure, however, requires a complex problem of counterfactual reasoning that depends on the (unknowable) distribution of underlying memory signals: when faced with two people differing in both hit rate and false alarm rate, the question of who had the better memory is really “who would have had more hits if they each had the same number of false alarms”. As a result of this difficulty, different literatures in memory research (e.g., visual working memory, eyewitness identification, picture memory, etc) have settled on a variety of distinct metrics to combine hit rates and false alarm rates (e.g., A’, corrected hit rate, percent correct, d’, diagnosticity ratios, K values, etc.). These metrics make different, contradictory assumptions about the distribution of latent memory signals, and all of their assumptions are frequently incorrect. Despite a large literature on how to properly measure memory performance, spanning decades, real-life decisions are often made using these metrics, even when they subsequently turn out to be wrong when memory is studied with better measures. We suggest that in order for the psychology and neuroscience of memory to become a cumulative, theory-driven science, more attention must be given to measurement issues. We make a concrete suggestion: the default memory task should change from old/new (“did you see this item’?”) to forced-choice (“which of these two items did you see?”). In situations where old/new variants are preferred (e.g., eyewitness identification; theoretical investigations of the nature of memory decisions), receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis should always be performed.

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“…In fact, Makovski (2016) found considerable PI in what is arguably the most prototypical form of change detection experiments, namely when items were presented simultaneously at different spatial locations. In contrast, with the same set-size and a smaller total number of items, Balaban et al (2019) found virtually no evidence for PI in a color change detection experiment (but see the alternative interpretation above).…”

Section: Pi and Spatial Organizationmentioning

confidence: 83%

“…Results showed little additional PI when items had occurred in immediately preceding trials. 5 Even in a large-scale study with thousands of participants, Balaban, Fukuda, and Luria (2019) observed little change in performance across trials in a color change detection task, suggesting either that this paradigm seems relatively insensitive to PI across trials or that, with sufficiently strong PI and highly familiar materials, PI effects arise so quickly that no change in performance is detectable over trials (see e.g., Carroll et al, 2010;Gardiner et al, 1972;Hopkins et al, 1972;Jitsumori, Wright, & Shyan, 1989;Kincaid & Wickens, 1970;Wickens et al, 1963;Wickens, 1970, for evidence that PI effects arise very quickly). 5 Even more dramatically, in a large scale Web-based study, Hartshorne (2008) observed a memory capacity of only 2.75 on the first trial of experiment, where PI could not yet have occurred.…”

Section: Memory Limitations and Proactive Interferencementioning

confidence: 99%

Memory and Proactive Interference for spatially distributed items

Ad¹

2021

Preprint

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Our ability to briefly retain information is often limited. Proactive Interference (PI) might contribute to these limitations (e.g., when it is hard to reject items in a recognition test that have appeared recently). In visual Working Memory (WM), spatial information might protect WM against PI, especially if encoding items together with their spatial locations makes item-location combinations less confusable than simple items without a spatial component. Here, I ask (1) if PI is observed for spatially distributed items, (2) if it arises among simple items or among item-location combinations, and (3) if spatial information affects PI at all. I show that PI is reliably observed for spatially distributed items except when it is weak. PI mostly reflects items that appear recently or frequently as memory items, while occurrences as test items play a smaller role, presumably because their temporal context is easier to encode. Through mathematical modeling, I then show that interference occurs among simple items rather than item-location combinations. Finally, to understand the effects of spatial information, I separate the effects of (a) the presence and (b) the predictiveness of spatial information on memory and its susceptibility to PI. Memory is impaired when items are spatially distributed, but, depending on the analysis, unaffected by the predictiveness of spatial information. In contrast, the susceptibility to PI is unaffected by either manipulation. Visual memory is thus impaired by PI for spatially distributed items due to interference from recent memory items (rather than test items or item-location combinations).

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What can half a million change detection trials tell us about visual working memory?

Cited by 30 publications

References 33 publications

Individual Differences in Working Memory and the N2pc

Individual Differences in Working Memory and the N2pc

Measuring memory is harder than you think: How to avoid problematic measurement practices in memory research

Memory and Proactive Interference for spatially distributed items

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