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Related Experiment Video

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Items on the left are better remembered.

Sergio Della Sala¹, Stephen Darling, Robert H Logie

¹Human Cognitive Neuroscience and Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK. sergio@ed.ac.uk

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006)

|March 23, 2010

Summary

Neurologically intact individuals exhibit a leftward bias in visual short-term memory. Items presented on the left are better remembered than those on the right, indicating a spatial asymmetry in memory.

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Neuroscience
Visual Perception and Memory

Background:

Neurologically intact individuals often display spatial biases in perception, such as a leftward bias in line bisection tasks.
Previous research has established spatial biases in perceptual tasks, but their influence on visual short-term memory is less understood.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether a spatial bias exists in the short-term memory of arbitrary visual feature bindings.
To determine if items presented in specific spatial locations are recalled with differential accuracy in visual short-term memory.

Main Methods:

Three experiments were conducted, involving a total of over 60,000 participants for two experiments and 144 participants for the third.
Participants were tasked with reproducing arrays of shape-color-location bindings from immediate memory.
Error rates in reproduction were analyzed based on the original spatial location of the presented items.

Main Results:

A significant leftward bias was observed in the reproduction of visual feature bindings from short-term memory.
More errors were consistently made when recalling items originally presented on the right side of the array compared to the left.
These findings were not attributable to perceptual errors, presentation order, or reproduction order.

Conclusions:

The results indicate a spatial asymmetry in visual short-term memory, where items on the left are better retained.
This suggests that the formation or retrieval of feature bindings in visual short-term memory is spatially biased.
The study provides novel evidence for a leftward bias in visual short-term memory for arbitrary feature bindings.