Biological motion is stored independently from bound representation in working memory

ABSTRACT

It has been suggested that biological motion has a storage buffer independent of that of basic visual information in working memory. However, as coherent biological motion requires binding information from both the dorsal and ventral pathways, it is possible that biological motion is a type of bound representation, and thus shares the same buffer as binding information. No study has investigated this hypothesis. We closed this gap by requiring participants to memorize a set of biological motion stimuli and colour-shape bindings concurrently. Critically, we fixed the load of one category while manipulating the load of the other. If biological motion and binding share a buffer, then working memory performance on the fixed-load category would be modulated by the memory load of the flexible-load category. In five experiments, we found that performance on the fixed-load category was not affected by the memory load of the other category, suggesting that biological motion and bound representation do not share the same buffer in working memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Biological motion
• working memory
• binding

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The overall accuracy of the digit task was 98%, 96%, 96%, 96%, and 97%, for Experiments 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, respectively.

2 To test binding (swapping features between two objects when a change occurs), participants had to retain at least 2 bindings.

3 We thanked an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 31771202 and 31571119], Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China [grant number 2016YFE0130400], and Humanities and Social Sciences of China Ministry of Education [grant number 17YJA190005].