The rise and fall of memories: Temporal dynamics of visual working memory.

Visual working memory (VWM) is a cognitive system, which temporarily stores task-relevant visual information to enable interactions with the environment. In everyday VWM use, we typically decide how long we look to encode information, and how long we wait before acting on the memory. In contrast, VW...

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Publicado en:Memory & Cognition Vol. 53; no. 8; pp. 2406 - 2424
Autores principales: Sahakian, Andre, Gayet, Surya, Paffen, Chris L. E., Van der Stigchel, Stefan
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Springer Nature Nov2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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      dt: Nov2025
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        atl: The rise and fall of memories: Temporal dynamics of visual working memory.
      aug:
        au:
          Sahakian, Andre
          Gayet, Surya
          Paffen, Chris L. E.
          Van der Stigchel, Stefan
        affil: https://ror.org/04pp8hn57 Experimental Psychology, Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 1, 3584 CS, Utrecht, The Netherlands
      su:
        Task performance
        Decision making
        Research funding
        Logistic regression analysis
        Statistical sampling
        Descriptive statistics
        Short-term memory
        Visual perception
        Data analysis software
        Confidence intervals
        Comparative studies
        Time
      sug:
        subj:
          Task performance
          Decision making
          Marketing Research and Public Opinion Polling
          Research funding
          Logistic regression analysis
          Statistical sampling
          Descriptive statistics
          Short-term memory
          Visual perception
          Data analysis software
          Confidence intervals
          Comparative studies
          Time
      keyword:
        Active vision
        Copying task
        Encoding time
        Psychology and Cognitive Sciences Psychology
        Retention time
        Visual working memory
        Active vision
        Copying task
        Encoding time
        Psychology and Cognitive Sciences Psychology
        Retention time
        Visual working memory
      ab: Visual working memory (VWM) is a cognitive system, which temporarily stores task-relevant visual information to enable interactions with the environment. In everyday VWM use, we typically decide how long we look to encode information, and how long we wait before acting on the memory. In contrast, VWM is typically studied in unnaturally rigid paradigms that keep presentation times and delays fixed. Here, we ask how visual memories build up over self-paced viewing times, and how they decay over self-paced delays, in a task that naturally engages VWM. We employed a copying task in which participants were tasked to recreate an "example" arrangement of items in an adjacent empty "workspace". We tracked their unconstrained viewing and copying behavior at the level of individual items' viewing times and the time to successful placements (i.e., delay). Our results show that performance monotonically increased for viewing times up to 1 s (per item), and plateaued afterwards. Interestingly, while views exceeding 1 s did not strongly improve performance for short (2-s) delays, views beyond 1-s did improve performance for longer delays. In contrast, this pattern was not observed in Experiments 2A and 2B, where viewing and delay times were experimentally manipulated (i.e., in more typical, rigid paradigms). These findings showcase the importance of considering aspects of naturalistic behavior, like decision-making, when studying VWM. We suggest that in everyday situations, short glances are sufficient for immediate use from VWM, but long views are required for effective delayed use.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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