Journal Article10.1037/A0016797
Compression in Visual Working Memory: Using Statistical Regularities to Form More Efficient Memory Representations.
TL;DR: The current study shows that observers can take advantage of redundancies in the input to remember more items in working memory, and suggests that the underlying capacity of the individuals' working memory is unchanged, but the information they have to remember can be encoded in a more compressed fashion.
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Abstract: The information that individuals can hold in working memory is quite limited, but researchers have typically studied this capacity using simple objects or letter strings with no associations between them. However, in the real world there are strong associations and regularities in the input. In an information theoretic sense, regularities introduce redundancies that make the input more compressible. The current study shows that observers can take advantage of these redundancies, enabling them to remember more items in working memory. In 2 experiments, covariance was introduced between colors in a display so that over trials some color pairs were more likely to appear than other color pairs. Observers remembered more items from these displays than from displays where the colors were paired randomly. The improved memory performance cannot be explained by simply guessing the high-probability color pair, suggesting that observers formed more efficient representations to remember more items. Further, as observers learned the regularities, their working memory performance improved in a way that is quantitatively predicted by a Bayesian learning model and optimal encoding scheme. These results suggest that the underlying capacity of the individuals’ working memory is unchanged, but the information they have to remember can be encoded in a more compressed fashion.
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Citations
Putting Education in “Educational” Apps Lessons From the Science of Learning
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek,Jennifer M. Zosh,Roberta Michnick Golinkoff,James H. Gray,Michael B. Robb,Jordy Kaufman +5 more
TL;DR: A way to define the potential educational impact of current and future apps is offered and how the design and use of educational apps aligns with known processes of children’s learning and development is shown to offer a framework that can be used by parents and designers alike.
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Neurocognitive Architecture of Working Memory
TL;DR: A crucial role for working memory in temporary information processing and guidance of complex behavior has been recognized for many decades, and recent data and models indicate that working memory may also be based on synaptic plasticity and thatWorking memory can operate on non-consciously perceived information.
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A review of visual memory capacity: Beyond individual items and toward structured representations.
TL;DR: The main thesis of this review will be that one cannot fully understand memory systems or memory processes without also determining the nature of memory representations, and how this impacts not only how the capacity of the system is estimated but how memory systems and memory processes are modeled.
Conceptual distinctiveness supports detailed visual long-term memory for real-world objects.
TL;DR: Object categories with conceptually distinctive exemplars showed less interference in memory as the number of exemplars increased, and observers' capacity to remember visual information in long-term memory depends more on conceptual structure than perceptual distinctiveness.
Hierarchical Encoding in Visual Working Memory Ensemble Statistics Bias Memory for Individual Items
TL;DR: Evidence is reported that the remembered size of each individual item in a display is biased toward the mean size of the set of items in the same color and themean size of all items in an display, suggesting that visual working memory is constructive.
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