cogsci.ucsd.edu)Alan Robinson1, Alberto Manzi, Jochen Triesch
1Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, USA
The capacity of visual working memory has been extensively characterized, but little work has investigated how occupying visual memory influences other aspects of cognition and perception. Here we show a novel effect: maintaining an item in visual working memory slows processing of similar visual stimuli during the maintenance period. Subjects judged the gender of computer rendered faces or the naturalness of body postures while maintaining different visual memory loads. We found that when stimuli of the same class (faces or bodies) were maintained in memory, perceptual judgments were slowed. Interestingly, this is the opposite of what would be predicted from traditional priming. Our results suggest there is interference between visual working memory and perception, caused by visual similarity between new perceptual input and items already encoded in memory.
Citation: Robinson, A., Manzi, A., & Triesch, J. (2008).
Object perception is selectively slowed by a visually similar working memory
load. Journal of Vision, 8(16):7, 1-13,
View paper at JOV (for free!), or download paper directly (PDF, 979k).
View full-sized pictures of some of the stimuli, from a related talk
(c) 2009 Alan Robinson (robinsoncogsci.ucsd.edu)