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Are multiple visual short-term memory storages necessary to explain the retro-cue effect?
1Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive Sciences, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, MN, USA. tal.makovski@gmail.com
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
|March 15, 2012
Summary
Retro-cues enhance visual short-term memory (VSTM) performance. However, this study shows the retro-cue advantage persists even with interference, challenging the two-storage VSTM model.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Human Memory
Background:
- Change detection performance is improved by retro-cues directing attention during memory retention.
- This retro-cue advantage has supported a two-storage model of visual short-term memory (VSTM): one durable and one fragile.
- The two-storage model posits that retro-cues protect fragile VSTM from overwriting.
Purpose of the Study:
- To empirically test the assumptions of the two-storage VSTM account.
- To investigate whether the retro-cue advantage is maintained under conditions of interference.
- To determine if interference magnitude differs between no-cue and retro-cue trials.
Main Methods:
- Participants encoded color arrays for a change detection task.
- The task included both no-cue and retro-cue conditions.
- Visual or central interference was introduced after encoding and before the cue/test display.
Main Results:
- A significant retro-cue advantage was observed.
- This advantage persisted even with subsequent visual or central interference.
- The magnitude of interference did not differ between no-cue and retro-cue conditions.
Conclusions:
- The findings undermine the primary empirical support for the two-storage VSTM model.
- The retro-cue benefit cannot be reliably used to distinguish between different VSTM storage mechanisms.
- Attention's role in VSTM may be more complex than previously suggested by the two-storage hypothesis.
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