Activated long-term memory and visual working memory during hybrid visual search: Effects on target memory search and...

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Hybrid visual search requires maintaining multiple target templates, potentially exceeding visual working memory (VWM) capacity.
• When VWM capacity is exceeded, target templates are thought to be stored in activated long-term memory (aLTM).
• The impact of hybrid search demands on memory for distractors remains largely unexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the effect of hybrid visual search on distractor memory.
• To determine how increasing the number of target templates impacts distractor memory components, including location and recognition memory.
• To clarify the interplay between activated long-term memory (aLTM) for targets and visual working memory (VWM) for distractors.

Main Methods:

• Participants engaged in hybrid visual search tasks with varying numbers of target templates.
• Measures included search response times (RT), dwell time on distractors, false alarms, and misses.
• Distractor memory was assessed through distractor revisits and a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) recognition memory test.

Main Results:

• Increasing the target memory set size significantly increased search RTs, distractor dwell times, false alarms, and target misses.
• More target templates led to increased revisits to distractors, indicating impaired distractor location memory.
• Distractor recognition memory, tested via a 2AFC task, was unaffected by the size of the target memory set.

Conclusions:

• Hybrid visual search with expanded target sets in aLTM impairs memory for distractor locations.
• There is a dissociation between the memory systems used for target templates (aLTM) and distractor information (VWM).
• Loading aLTM with numerous target templates does not interfere with the capacity of VWM for distracting visual information.