Alessandra S. Souza: Boosting the Storage Capacity and Fidelity of Visual Working Memory

University of Porto, Portugal

We have a limited ability to maintain visual information readily accessible in mind to guide our thoughts and actions. This restricts how well we can perform a number of routine tasks. For example, we may forget the face of someone we just met, preventing us from finding them in the crowd. Visual working memory is the system that stores this information online. Capacity limitations on this system arises from two sources: the number of items that can be stored simultaneously and their fidelity (aka memory precision). In this talk, I will show how working memory capacity limitations can be bypassed by drawing on the unlimited processing capacity of our long-term memories, and the conditions in which this interaction is more likely to occur. In the first half of the talk, I will show how categorizing continuous information into discrete instances (by verbally labeling it when learning it) can allow us to retain more precise visual working memories. In the second half, I will discuss how the use of prior knowledge about object-color co-occurrences can also boost retention of more continuous visual details in working memory. Taken together, these results show that we can supplement our limited working memory by activating on-the-fly information in our long-term memories.

 

This talk is part of the BCCN Berlin junior lecture series/ PhD colloquium. Guests are welcome!

 

Organized by

Joana Seabra / Lisa Velenosi