Updating objects in visual short-term memory is feature selective

The purpose of this study was to examine whether the process of updating information in visual short-term memory (VSTM) is object based. We investigated whether modifying the memory of one feature of an object would automatically promote refreshing the memory of all of its other features. The result...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Memory & cognition 2009-09, Vol.37 (6), p.909-923
Main Authors: Ko, Philip C., Seiffert, Adriane E.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Attention
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Biological and medical sciences
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive Psychology
Color Perception
Discrimination (Psychology)
Experiments
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human
Humans
Hypotheses
Learning. Memory
Male
Memory
Memory, Short-Term
Orientation
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Psychology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Psychophysics
Studies
Young Adult
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Summary:The purpose of this study was to examine whether the process of updating information in visual short-term memory (VSTM) is object based. We investigated whether modifying the memory of one feature of an object would automatically promote refreshing the memory of all of its other features. The results showed that the facilitative effect of updating was specific to the updated feature of an object and did not spread to its nonupdated features. This feature-selective effect suggests that updating VSTM is not object based (Experiment 1), even though storage was object based (Experiment 2). Control experiments ruled out strategy-based (Experiment 3) and stimulus-related (Experiments 4–6) accounts. Feature-selective updating may indicate that the mechanism used to modify the contents of memory may have a different basis than that used to encode or store information in memory.
ISSN:0090-502X
1532-5946
DOI:10.3758/MC.37.6.909