2022 |
Tamber-Rosenau, Benjamin [⬀] Kulesz, Paulina |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
What Limits Visual Working Memory?
This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).
Remembering and thinking about things seen moments beforehand—termed visual working memory (VWM)—is surprisingly difficult. People continuously use their limited VWM for basic tasks like navigating a car or rapidly finding the eyeglasses they just put down. Because VWM is associated with intelligence, VWM affects academic and professional performance. VWM degrades with aging, disorders (like ADHD or schizophrenia), and brain injuries. Like a tune-up or repair of a mechanical system needs some understanding of how the system is built, an intervention to improve VWM would benefit from knowledge of the working memory system’s architecture. To gain a more full understanding of VWM’s structure and its relationships to other aspects of thinking, new research infrastructure is needed. This infrastructure will then enable future examination of how little-studied VWM capacity limits (beyond the amount of information that can be stored) are related to thinking and perception, which will in turn indicate if what is known about the well-studied VWM storage capacity generalizes to these other important limits on VWM. To enable this future examination, the present research will iteratively devise and pilot component research tasks to ultimately form an approximately 8-hour extensible suite of cognitive tests that will serve as infrastructure for the aforementioned future VWM research in healthy young adults. Moreover, this infrastructure will eventually enable further research on how VWM changes over the lifespan and in populations of disorder and/or neurological injury.
To date, the vast majority of VWM research has focused on storage capacity, but neglected how information moves from visual perception into VWM (termed consolidation) and how memories for items that are near one another are kept separate (termed resolution). Consolidation determines if seen items make it into memory before being disrupted by distraction. Resolution determines whether remembering an item means that memory for additional, nearby items is less accurate. Understanding these limits is critical for generalizing from the lab to the real world, where objects and events are close to one another and distraction is frequent. This research will enable future measurement of individual differences in storage, consolidation, and resolution; other kinds of working memory; attention; and executive control using computerized tasks. These data could then be used to determine how these distinct capacity limits relate to one another. This is important to science because it is vigorously debated whether working memory should be thought of as limited by a single resource that is shared for different kinds of memory representations and processes, versus being a series of distinct systems, each with their own separate capacity limits. The novel inclusion of consolidation and resolution measures in the new research infrastructure (test suite) will allow a much more complete and accurate picture compared to past research. This, in turn, is important to society because it could greatly change how therapies or interventions are targeted. For instance, intervention strategies would be different if verbal training could benefit visual memory, compared to if verbal and visual memory were independently limited. Present evaluations of working memory typically either focus on VWM storage capacity, or on verbal versus visuospatial memory span; when these are considered together, VWM consolidation and resolution are not included. The test suite that will be the product of the present research will overcome this limitation.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
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