In this training study, we aimed to selectively train participants' filtering mechanisms to enhance visual working memory (WM) efficiency. The highly restricted nature of visual WM capacity renders efficient filtering mechanisms crucial for its successful functioning. Filtering efficiency in visual WM can be measured via the lateralized change detection task with distractors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the lateralized change detection task, two item arrays are presented, one on each side of the display. Participants have to remember the items in the relevant hemifield and ignore the items in the irrelevant hemifield. A difference wave between contralateral and ipsilateral slow potentials with respect to the relevant items, the contralateral delay activity, can be calculated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResearch on the effects of perceptual manipulations on recognition memory has suggested that (a) recollection is selectively influenced by task-relevant information and (b) familiarity can be considered perceptually specific. The present experiment tested divergent assumptions that (a) perceptual features can influence conscious object recollection via verbal code despite being task-irrelevant and that (b) perceptual features do not influence object familiarity if study is verbal-conceptual. At study, subjects named objects and their presentation colour; this was followed by an old/new object recognition test.
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