Time-dependent forgetting in visual short-term memory

ABSTRACT

Whether visual short-term memory can be lost over an unfilled delay, in line with time-dependent forgetting, is controversial and prior work has yielded mixed results. The present study explored time-dependent forgetting in visual short-term memory in relation to other factors. In three experiments, participants compared single target and probe objects over a 2 s or 10 s retention interval. The objects across trials were either similar or dissimilar (Experiment 1) and had to be remembered in the presence of an additional distractor (Experiment 2) or under conditions where the amount of time separating trials varied (Experiment 3). In all experiments, the retention interval manipulation made the biggest contribution to performance, with accuracy decreasing as the retention interval was lengthened from 2 s to 10 s. These results pose problems for interference and temporal distinctiveness models of memory but are compatible with temporal forgetting mechanisms such as decay.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual short-term memory
• forgetting
• decay
• interference
• temporal distinctiveness

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Oliver Haden, Fatima Aktar and Sana Amrin for their help with data collection in Experiment 1. The stimuli used in this study were provided courtesy of Michael J. Tarr, Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition and Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University (http://www.tarrlab.org/).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Bayesian correlations were used to assess the relationship between performance in each condition of Experiment 1, overall self-reported mind wandering and mind wandering during each retention interval. All Bayes Factors (BF₁₀) were under 0.5 and usually compatible with the null hypothesis (<0.33).