Introducing ART: A new method for testing auditory memory with circular reproduction tasks.

Theories of visual working memory have seen significant progress through the use of continuous reproduction tasks. However, these tasks have mainly focused on studying visual features, with limited examples existing in the auditory domain. Therefore, it is unknown to what extent newly developed memory models reflect domain-general limitations or are specific to the visual domain.

Probabilistic and rich individual working memories revealed by a betting game.

When asked to remember a color, do people remember a point estimate (e.g., a particular shade of red), a point estimate plus an uncertainty estimate, or are memory representations rich probabilistic distributions over feature space? We asked participants to report the color of a circle held in working memory.

Meaningful objects avoid attribute amnesia due to incidental long-term memories.

Attribute amnesia describes the failure to unexpectedly report the attribute of an attended stimulus, likely reflecting a lack of working memory consolidation. Previous studies have shown that unique meaningful objects are immune to attribute amnesia. However, these studies used highly dissimilar foils to test memory, raising the possibility that good performance at the surprise test was based on an imprecise (gist-like) form of long-term memory.

Perception, performance, and detectability of conversational artificial intelligence across 32 university courses.

The emergence of large language models has led to the development of powerful tools such as ChatGPT that can produce text indistinguishable from human-generated work. With the increasing accessibility of such technology, students across the globe may utilize it to help with their school work-a possibility that has sparked ample discussion on the integrity of student evaluation processes in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). To date, it is unclear how such tools perform compared to students on university-level courses across various disciplines.

No evidence that the retro-cue benefit requires reallocation of memory resources.

Selective mechanisms allow us to prioritize items held in working memory. Does this reflect reallocation of working memory resources? We examined a critical prediction of this account-that reallocating more resources from one item to another should provide a greater benefit. We used a reward manipulation to create variable allocation of resources.

Common Neural Mechanisms Control Attention and Working Memory.

Although previous studies point to qualitative similarities between working memory (WM) and attention, the degree to which these two constructs rely on shared neural mechanisms remains unknown. Focusing on one such potentially shared mechanism, we tested the hypothesis that selecting an item within WM utilizes similar neural mechanisms as selecting a visible item via a shift of attention. We used fMRI and machine learning to decode both the selection among items visually available and the selection among items stored in WM in human subjects (both sexes).

Perception is rich and probabilistic.

When we see a stimulus, e.g. a star-shaped object, our intuition is that we should perceive a single, coherent percept (even if it is inaccurate).

Training modulates memory-driven capture.

Attention is captured by information matching the contents of working memory. Though many factors modulate the amount of capture, there is surprising resistance to cognitive control. Capture occurs even when participants are instructed either that an item would never be a target or to drop that item from memory.

How do expectations change behavior? Investigating the contributions at encoding versus decision-making.

Expectations about the environment play a large role in shaping behavior, but how does this occur? Do expectations change the way we perceive the world, or just our decisions based on unbiased perceptions? We investigated the relative contributions of priors to these 2 stages by manipulating when information about expected color was provided. We compared cases where the prior could affect encoding into perceptual/working memory representations (e.g.

How selection in the mind is different from attention to the world.

Attentional mechanisms allow us to focus on objects that would help us achieve our goals while ignoring those that would distract us. Attention can also be focused internally toward specific items in memory. But does selection within memory work similarly to selection within perception? Perceptual attention is fast and effective at selecting regions of space.

Object-based selection in visual working memory.

Attentional mechanisms in perception can operate over locations, features, or objects. However, people direct attention not only towards information in the external world, but also to information maintained in working memory. To what extent do perception and memory draw on similar selection properties? Here we examined whether principles of object-based attention can also hold true in visual working memory.

Selection in working memory is resource-demanding: Concurrent task effects on the retro-cue effect.

In a retro-cue paradigm, after memorizing a set of objects, people are cued to remember only a subset. Improved memory from the retro-cue suggests that selection processes can benefit items stored in working memory. Does selection in working memory require attention? If so, an attention-demanding task should disrupt retro-cue effects.

The road to long-term memory: Top-down attention is more effective than bottom-up attention for forming long-term memories.

Does the strength of representations in long-term memory (LTM) depend on which type of attention is engaged? We tested participants' memory for objects seen during visual search. We compared implicit memory for two types of objects-related-context nontargets that grabbed attention because they matched the target defining feature (i.e.

Memory-driven capture occurs for individual features of an object.

Items held in working memory (WM) capture attention (memory-driven capture). People can selectively prioritize specific object features in WM. Here, we examined whether feature-specific prioritization within WM modulates memory-driven capture.

Working memory is corrupted by strategic changes in search templates.

When searching for a specific object, we often form an image of the target, which we use as a search template. This template is thought to be maintained in working memory, primarily because of evidence that the contents of working memory influences search behavior. However, it is unknown whether this interaction applies in both directions.

Humans incorporate trial-to-trial working memory uncertainty into rewarded decisions.

Working memory (WM) plays an important role in action planning and decision making; however, both the informational content of memory and how that information is used in decisions remain poorly understood. To investigate this, we used a color WM task in which subjects viewed colored stimuli and reported both an estimate of a stimulus color and a measure of memory uncertainty, obtained through a rewarded decision. Reported memory uncertainty is correlated with memory error, showing that people incorporate their trial-to-trial memory quality into rewarded decisions.

Visual search within working memory.

Attention and working memory are 2 key pillars of cognition. Despite much research, there are important aspects about the relationship between the 2 constructs that are not well understood. Here we explore the similarity in the mechanisms that select and update working memory to those that guide attention during perception, such as in visual search.

A common source of attention for auditory and visual tracking.

Tasks that require tracking visual information reveal the severe limitations of our capacity to attend to multiple objects that vary in time and space. Although these limitations have been extensively characterized in the visual domain, very little is known about tracking information in other sensory domains. Does tracking auditory information exhibit characteristics similar to those of tracking visual information, and to what extent do these two tracking tasks draw on the same attention resources? We addressed these questions by asking participants to perform either single or dual tracking tasks from the same (visual-visual) or different (visual-auditory) perceptual modalities, with the difficulty of the tracking tasks being manipulated across trials.

How humans react to changing rewards during visual foraging.

Much is known about the speed and accuracy of search in single-target search tasks, but less attention has been devoted to understanding search in multiple-target foraging tasks. These tasks raise and answer important questions about how individuals decide to terminate searches in cases in which the number of targets in each display is unknown. Even when asked to find every target, individuals quit before exhaustively searching a display.

Looking inward and back: Real-time monitoring of visual working memories.

Confidence in our memories is influenced by many factors, including beliefs about the perceptibility or memorability of certain kinds of objects and events, as well as knowledge about our skill sets, habits, and experiences. Notoriously, our knowledge and beliefs about memory can lead us astray, causing us to be overly confident in eyewitness testimony or to overestimate the frequency of recent experiences. Here, using visual working memory as a case study, we stripped away all these potentially misleading cues, requiring observers to make confidence judgments by directly assessing the quality of their memory representations.

Strategic trade-offs between quantity and quality in working memory.

Is working memory capacity determined by an immutable limit-for example, 4 memory storage slots? The fact that performance is typically unaffected by task instructions has been taken as support for such structural models of memory. Here, we modified a standard working memory task to incentivize participants to remember more items. Participants were asked to remember a set of colors over a short retention interval.

Winter is coming: How humans forage in a temporally structured environment.

Much is known about visual search for single targets, but relatively little about how participants "forage" for multiple targets. One important question is how long participants will search before moving to a new display. Evidence suggests that participants should leave when intake drops below the average rate ("optimal foraging," Charnov, 1976).

Using the past to anticipate the future in human foraging behavior.

Humans engage in many tasks that involve gathering multiple targets from their environment (e.g., picking berries from a patch).

Working memory storage is intrinsically domain specific.

A longstanding debate in working memory (WM) is whether information is maintained in a central, capacity-limited storage system or whether there are domain-specific stores for different modalities. This question is typically addressed by determining whether concurrent storage of 2 different memory arrays produces interference. Prior studies using this approach have shown at least some cost to maintaining 2 memory arrays that differed in perceptual modalities.