The dominance of spatial information in object identity judgments: A persistent congruency bias even amidst conflicting statistical regularities.

Previous studies have posited that spatial location plays a special role in object recognition. Notably, the "spatial congruency bias (SCB)" is a tendency to report objects as the same identity if they are presented at the same location, compared to different locations. Here we found that even when statistical regularities were manipulated in the opposite direction (objects in the same location were three times more likely to be different identities), subjects still exhibited a robust SCB (more likely to report them as the same identity).

Directed forgetting of pictures of everyday objects.

Directed forgetting is a laboratory task in which subjects are explicitly cued to forget certain items and remember others. Volitional control over the contents of memory has been used to study clinical disorders, with successful intentional control of memory being a hallmark of a healthy mind. Yet the degree of volitional forgetting over the content of visual long-term memory is unclear when compared to words.

RT-Cloud: A cloud-based software framework to simplify and standardize real-time fMRI.

Real-time fMRI (RT-fMRI) neurofeedback has been shown to be effective in treating neuropsychiatric disorders and holds tremendous promise for future breakthroughs, both with regard to basic science and clinical applications. However, the prevalence of its use has been hampered by computing hardware requirements, the complexity of setting up and running an experiment, and a lack of standards that would foster collaboration. To address these issues, we have developed RT-Cloud (https://github.

Visual working memory items drift apart due to active, not passive, maintenance.

How are humans capable of maintaining detailed representations of visual items in memory? When required to make fine discriminations, we sometimes implicitly differentiate memory representations away from each other to reduce interitem confusion. However, this separation of representations can inadvertently lead memories to be recalled as biased away from other memory items, a phenomenon termed repulsion bias. Using a nonretinotopically specific working memory paradigm, we found stronger repulsion bias with longer working memory delays, but only when items were actively maintained.

What do laboratory-forgetting paradigms tell us about use-inspired forgetting?

Directed forgetting is a laboratory task in which subjects are told to remember some information and forget other information. In directed forgetting tasks, participants are able to exert intentional control over which information they retain in memory and which information they forget. Forgetting in this task appears to be mediated by intentional control of memory states in which executive control mechanisms suppress unwanted information.

Statistical learning as a reference point for memory distortions: Swap and shift errors.

Humans use regularities in the environment to facilitate learning, often without awareness or intent. How might such regularities distort long-term memory? Here, participants studied and reported the colors of objects in a long-term memory paradigm, uninformed that certain colors were sampled more frequently overall. When participants misreported an object's color, these errors were often centered around the average studied color (i.

Recognition-induced forgetting of schematically related pictures.

Recognition-induced forgetting is the category-specific forgetting of pictures that occurs when a subset of a category of pictures is recognized, leading to forgetting of the remaining pictures. We have previously shown that recognition-induced forgetting does not operate over categories created by temporal relationships, suggesting that this effect does not operate over episodic memory representations. Here we systematically tested whether schematically related categories of pictures are immune to recognition-induced forgetting.

Attention scales according to inferred real-world object size.

Natural scenes consist of objects of varying shapes and sizes. The impact of object size on visual perception has been well-demonstrated, from classic mental imagery experiments, to recent studies of object representations reporting topographic organization of object size in the occipito-temporal cortex. While the role of real-world physical size in perception is clear, the effect of inferred size on attentional selection is ill-defined.