Department of Psychology, Mississippi State University.
Psychol Sci. 2018 Jun;29(6):877-887. doi: 10.1177/0956797617747118. Epub 2018 Apr 19.
Iconic memory is characterized by its large storage capacity and brief storage duration, whereas visual working memory is characterized by its small storage capacity. The limited information stored in working memory is often modeled as an all-or-none process in which studied information is either successfully stored or lost completely. This view raises a simple question: If almost all viewed information is stored in iconic memory, yet one second later most of it is completely absent from working memory, what happened to it? Here, I characterized how the precision and capacity of iconic memory changed over time and observed a clear dissociation: Iconic memory suffered from a complete loss of visual items, while the precision of items retained in memory was only marginally affected by the passage of time. These results provide new evidence for the discrete-capacity view of working memory and a new characterization of iconic memory decay.
标志性记忆的特点是存储容量大、存储时间短，而视觉工作记忆的特点是存储容量小。工作记忆中存储的有限信息通常被建模为一种全有或全无的过程，在这个过程中，被研究的信息要么被成功存储，要么完全丢失。这就提出了一个简单的问题：如果几乎所有被看到的信息都存储在标志性记忆中，但一秒钟后，工作记忆中大部分信息都完全消失了，那么这些信息去了哪里？在这里，我描述了标志性记忆的精度和容量随时间的变化情况，并观察到了明显的分离：标志性记忆中视觉项目完全丢失，而记忆中保留的项目的精度仅受到时间流逝的轻微影响。这些结果为工作记忆的离散容量观点提供了新的证据，并对标志性记忆衰减进行了新的描述。
