Browsing by Subject "Visual working memory"

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Open Access
The bizarreness effect and visual imagery : no impact of concurrent visuo-spatial distractor tasks indicates little role for visual imagery
(American Psychological Association, 2021-08-05) Besken, Miri; Mulligan, N. W.
Ancient as well as modern writers have promoted the idea that bizarre images enhance memory. Research has documented bizarreness effects, with one standard technique finding that sentences describing unusual, implausible, or bizarre scenarios are better remembered than sentences describing plausible, every day, or common scenarios. Not surprisingly, this effect is often attributed to visual imagery, and the effect often referred to as the bizarre imagery effect. But the role of imagery has been disputed even as research has found it difficult to clearly distinguish the effects of imagery from other possible bases for the bizarreness advantage. The current experiments assessed the visual-imagery hypothesis by disrupting visual imagery processes during encoding, which should reduce the bizarreness effect if it is indeed due to imagery. Specifically, one group carried out a concurrent task that selectively disrupted visual working memory (and visual imagery) during the encoding of sentences; a control group encoded the sentences without distraction. Across four experiments, the distractor task was dynamic visual noise, the spatial tapping task, and a visual span task. Each experiment found a robust bizarreness effect that was never reduced by visuospatial distraction. Combined, meta-analytic, and Bayesian analyses concurred with the results of the individual experiments. The results indicate little role for visual imagery in the bizarreness effect.
Open Access
Working memory capacity: concurrent subtasks need not interfere
(2022-10) Şengil, Gülsüm Özge
Any extended task episode is subsumed by goal-directed programs that hierar- chically control its execution. We investigated the relationship between working memory capacity and the control instantiated by such hierarchical task entities across four experiments. In a new extended task consisting of subtask A and subtask B, participants first memorized the orientation of subtask A lines (let’s call this event mA), then memorized subtask B lines (mB), then recalled these B lines (rB), and finally recalled A lines (rA). The task structure was: mA-mB-rB- rA. Subtask A lines were thus held in mind during the execution of subtask B. Even though participants had to remember the orientation of lines in both cases, increased WM load of lines A only affected performance on subtask A and did not affect the performance on subtask B. In Experiment 2, four trials of Exp1 were organized into a complex 4-part task with the added condition that A lines of a part be recalled not in that part but in the next part. The task structure was: mA1-mB1-rB1—mA2-mB2-rB2-rA1—mA3-mB3-rB3-rA2—mB3-rB3-rA3. Load of A lines again did not affect B lines. Crucially, load of A2 and A3 lines did not affect the recall of A1 and A2 lines, respectively. In Experiment 3, in a design similar to Exp1, time constraint on mA and mB increased the interference across concurrent subtasks. Experiment 4 showed that increasing the similarity between subtask A and subtask B of Exp1 may increase the across-subtask in terference. We show that WM information of different concurrent subtasks can be maintained separately, perhaps as part of their goal-directed programs. And, encoding to these non-interfering stores, as well as retrieval from them, might depend on attentional and time-based mechanisms.