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    Psychol Sci. 2011 Mar;22(3):384-92. doi: 10.1177/0956797610397956. Epub 2011 Feb 4.

    Hierarchical encoding in visual working memory: ensemble statistics bias memory for individual items.

    Source

    Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge,MA 02139, USA. tfbrady@mit.edu

    Abstract

    Influential models of visual working memory treat each item to be stored as an independent unit and assume that there are no interactions between items. However, real-world displays have structure that provides higher-order constraints on the items to be remembered. Even in the case of a display of simple colored circles, observers can compute statistics, such as mean circle size, to obtain an overall summary of the display. We examined the influence of such an ensemble statistic on visual working memory. We report evidence 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 the mean size of all items in the display. This suggests that visual working memory is constructive, encoding displays at multiple levels of abstraction and integrating across these levels, rather than maintaining a veridical representation of each item independently.

    PMID:
    21296808
    [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

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