Journal Article

Hierarchical Encoding in Visual Working Memory: Ensemble Statistics Bias Memory for Individual Items

Brady, Timothy F., Alvarez, George A.

2011

Overview

Influential models of visual working memory treat each item to be stored as an independent unit and assume that there are no interactions between items. However, real-world displays have structure that provides higher-order constraints on the items to be remembered. Even in the case of a display of simple colored circles, observers can compute statistics, such as mean circle size, to obtain an overall summary of the display. We examined the influence of such an ensemble statistic on visual working memory. We report evidence that the remembered size of each individual item in a display is biased toward the mean size of the set of items in the same color and the mean size of all items in the display. This suggests that visual working memory is constructive, encoding displays at multiple levels of abstraction and integrating across these levels, rather than maintaining a veridical representation of each item independently.

• Publisher: SAGE Publications,Sage Publications,SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
• Subject: Attention / Bias / Biological and medical sciences / Cognitive psychology / Color Perception / Concept Formation / Encoding / Estimation bias / Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology / Generalization, Stimulus / Hierarchical scales / Human / Humans / Learning. Memory / Memory / Memory bias / Memory encoding / Memory recall / Memory, Short-Term / Modeling / Models, Psychological / Models, Statistical / Observers / Orientation / Pattern Recognition, Visual / Pixels / Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry / Psychology. Psychophysiology / Retention (Psychology) / Rule ordering / Short term memory / Size Perception / Statistical bias / Statistics / Summarization / Visual perception / Visual task performance / Working memory