summary: People underutilize their visual working memory (VWM) and typically remember fewer items than their capacity would allow: Study participants typically chose to recall only one item at a time, despite being capable of recalling three or four items.
This finding provides new insight into how VWM is utilized in everyday life, and further research is needed to explore the reasons behind this behavior.
Key Facts:
- People are underutilizing their visual working memory capacity and are able to recall fewer items.
- Participants typically remembered only one item at a time.
- This study provides new insights into the practical use of VWM.
sauce: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
A new study from researchers at Ben-Gurion University suggests that people tend to underutilize their visual working memory (VWM) capabilities rather than maximizing them.
This study Scientific Reports During April.
Visual working memory (VWM) is the ability to hold visual information in memory for a few seconds. It is crucial for everyday activities, yet its capacity is severely limited.
Experiments to assess this ability typically involve presenting subjects with a series of visual items and asking them to remember them for a future memory test. On average, subjects are able to remember only three or four items.
New research by Dr. Yoav Kessler and his student Shalva Kvitelashvili reveals that when people can determine how many items they remember, this number is actually much smaller, often just one item.
These findings shed new light on how VWM is used in real-world situations.
“The use of VWM has not been studied much until now because it is difficult to assess. In addition to our surprising findings about VWM, our experiments pave the way for further research into this fascinating everyday event,” said Professor Kessler. Professor Kessler and Professor Shalva are both professors in the Department of Psychology and the Department of Brain Sciences and Cognition.
In this study, a new paradigm called the “model reconstruction” task was introduced.
“In this task, participants are tasked with recreating a ‘target model’ consisting of randomly ordered colored squares. The model is first presented to participants, who then proceed to a reconstruction phase, during which participants are provided with an empty black frame.
“To recreate the model, participants used a computer mouse to specify the position and color of each square. Importantly, participants could press a button to freely review the model and switch between the model and the reconstruction screen as needed.
“By tracking the number of item locations after each review of the model, we can estimate the utilization of VWM capacity at each step.
“In addition to the novel task, participants were assessed on a visual change detection task, allowing us to examine correlations between VWM capacity measured in the standard task and VWM utilization and accuracy in the model reconstruction task,” the two wrote.
The researchers found that across two experiments, participants underused, rather than fully utilized, their VWM capacity. In most cases, participants chose to retain only one item at a time, despite being able to remember many more. Future studies should investigate why people do this and how this decision affects performance on real-world tasks.
Funding: This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant number 1088/21).
About this visual memory research news
author: Ehud Zion Waldokus
sauce: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
contact: Ehud Zion Waldox – Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
image: Image courtesy of Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“Spontaneous use of visual working memory” by Yoav Kessler et al. Scientific Reports
Abstract
Spontaneous use of visual working memory
Although a vast amount of research has focused on understanding the capacity limitations of visual working memory (VWM), little is known about how VWM resources are used for unforced actions and how this correlates with individual capacity constraints.
We present a novel, open, and easy-to-administer paradigm that allows participants to freely utilize their VWM capacities: participants were required to reconstruct an array of colored squares.
In each trial, subjects were allowed to switch between the memory array and the reconstruction screen any number of times, choosing the number of items to reconstruct each time. This approach allowed us to estimate the number of items used and the accuracy of the reconstruction.
Additionally, we measured VWM capacity using a change detection task, and two experiments showed that participants tended to underutilize VWM resources and perform well below their capacity limits.
Surprisingly, the extent to which participants utilized VWM, although highly reliable, did not correlate with VWM capacity, suggesting that VWM utilization is limited by strategic considerations rather than capacity limitations.
