Hierarchical Encoding in Visual Working Memory
By Timothy F. Brady, George A. Alvarez. Psychology Science, 2010
430 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/64b9afc7ad1ac4e6463b3b1ebe7a839331c64e79
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In Cognitive Neuroscience
Citations in the corpus
- Headphone screening to facilitate web-based auditory experiments (2017, background): “…has become popular in a number of subfields within cognitive psychology (Buhrmester et al., 2011; Crump et al., 2013), including visual perception (Brady and Alvarez, 2011; Freeman et al., 2013; Shin and Ma, 2016), cognition (Frank and Goodman, 2012; Hartshorne and Germine, 2015), and linguistics…”