Dataset Information

Swap errors in spatial working memory are guesses.

ABSTRACT: In typical visual working memory tasks, participants report the color of a previously studied item at some probed location. Alternatively, in some recent studies, a color is probed and participants must report the item's location. There is a surprising difference between these tasks: in location reports participants almost never guess randomly as they do when reporting color, but often incorrectly report the locations of non-probed items. This finding has been taken as evidence for feature binding errors in memory, and evidence against discrete capacity models, which predict that pure guessing should occur. We test an alternative possibility: that non-target responses are guesses, but intelligent ones. In particular, when asked to report the location of an item for which participants have no memory, they may guess near locations where they know something was presented. Here we present false-probe trials in which a color is probed that was not actually studied, and find that the responses, which are necessarily guesses, are nonetheless centered around studied locations. Moreover, we find that the confidence ratings for non-target responses are low, and similar to confidence for uniformly distributed guesses. In a second experiment, we find that manipulating the retention interval, which is known to affect guess rates, changes the rate of these low-confidence non-target responses. These results suggest that the tendency to report locations of non-probed items reflects a good guessing strategy; not something fundamental about how features and objects are represented in working memory.

SUBMITTER: Pratte MS

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7093911 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Swap errors in spatial working memory are guesses.

Pratte Michael S MS

Psychonomic bulletin & review 20190601 3

In typical visual working memory tasks, participants report the color of a previously studied item at some probed location. Alternatively, in some recent studies, a color is probed and participants must report the item's location. There is a surprising difference between these tasks: in location reports participants almost never guess randomly as they do when reporting color, but often incorrectly report the locations of non-probed items. This finding has been taken as evidence for feature bindi ...[more]

PMID: 30242631

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Project description:Ample research in visual working memory (VWM) has demonstrated that the memorized items are maintained in integrated spatial configurations, even when the spatial context is task irrelevant. These insights were obtained in studies in which participants were provided with the information they memorized. However, the encoding of provided information is only one aspect of memory. In everyday life, individuals often construct their own memory representations, an aspect of memory we have previously termed self-initiated (SI) working memory. In this study, we employed a SI VWM task in which participants selected the visual targets they memorized. The spatial locations of the targets were task irrelevant. Nevertheless, we were interested to see whether participants would construct spatially structured memory representations, which would suggest that they intended to maintain the visual targets as integrated spatial configurations. The results of two experiments demonstrated that participants constructed spatially structured configurations relative to random displays. Specifically, participants selected visual targets in close spatial proximity and constructed spatial sequences with short distances and fewer path crossings. When asked to construct configurations for a hypothetical competitor in a memory contest, participants disrupted the spatial structure by selecting visual targets that were further apart and by increasing the distances between them, which suggests that these characteristics were under their control. At the end of each experiment, participants provided verbal descriptions of the strategies they used to construct the memory displays. While the spatial structure of the SI memory representations was robust, it was absent from the participants' explicit descriptions, which focused on non-spatial strategies. Participants reported selecting items based, most frequently, on semantic categories and visual features. Taken together, these results demonstrated that participants had access to the metacognitive knowledge on the spatial structure of VWM representations, knowledge they manipulated to construct memory representations that enhanced or disrupted memory performance. While having a profound impact on behavior, this metacognitive knowledge on spatial structure remained implicit, as it was absent from the participants' verbal reports. Viewed from a larger perspective, this study explores how individuals interact with the world by actively structuring their surroundings to maximize cognitive performance.

Dataset Information

Swap errors in spatial working memory are guesses.

Publications

Swap errors in spatial working memory are guesses.

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