Dissociable loss of the representations in visual short-term memory

ABSTRACT

The present study investigated in what manner the information in visual short-term memory (VSTM) is lost. Participants memorized four items, one of which was given higher priority later by a retro-cue. Then participants were required to detect a possible change, which could be either a large or small change, occurred to one of the items. The results showed that the detection performance for the small change of the uncued items was poorer than the cued item, yet large change that occurred to all four memory items could be detected perfectly, indicating that the uncued representations lost some detailed information yet still had some basic features retained in VSTM. The present study suggests that after being encoded into VSTM, the information is not lost in an object-based manner; rather, features of an item are still dissociable, so that they can be lost separately.

Keywords:

• Dissociable loss
• feature
• object-based
• visual short-term memory

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Corrigendum

Author notes

Jie Li, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Section of Applied Psychology at Beijing Sport University. His research interests concern attention and working memory.

Funding

This research was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (31170975) and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 2015QN002, Beijing Sport University).