Time manages interference in visual short-term memory

ABSTRACT

Emerging evidence suggests that age-related declines in memory may reflect a failure in pattern separation, a process that is believed to reduce the encoding overlap between similar stimulus representations during memory encoding. Indeed, behavioural pattern separation may be indexed by a visual continuous recognition task in which items are presented in sequence and observers report for each whether it is novel, previously viewed (old), or whether it shares features with a previously viewed item (similar). In comparison to young adults, older adults show a decreased pattern separation when the number of items between “old” and “similar” items is increased. Yet the mechanisms of forgetting underpinning this type of recognition task are yet to be explored in a cognitively homogenous group, with careful control over the parameters of the task, including elapsing time (a critical variable in models of forgetting). By extending the inter-item intervals, number of intervening items and overall decay interval, we observed in a young adult sample (N = 35, M_age = 19.56 years) that the critical factor governing performance was inter-item interval. We argue that tasks using behavioural continuous recognition to index pattern separation in immediate memory will benefit from generous inter-item spacing, offering protection from inter-item interference.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual memory
• consolidation
• interference
• pattern separation
• pattern completion

Acknowledgements

We thank the editor, Dr Maire Poiter and Reviewers, Dr Timothy Ricker and Dr Alessandra Souza for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. Special thanks goes to Emma Almond, Tom Kelly Sarah Wilding, Michelle Ames and Kinga Bugajska for their invaluable help with part of the data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number 1359029] awarded to Amy V. Smith.