CNH Seminar by Dr Paul Garrett

Talk Abstract: Visual working memory is the roughly four item capacity limited bottleneck in translating perception into action. Work from the Vision Lab suggests this item limit reflects an underlying continuous distribution of mnemonic resources, with response outcomes the product of encoding limits and decisional noise. In a series of recent experiments, we show that mnemonic resources are continuously distributed; how memory encoding is limited by increasing set sizes, and facilitated by object conjunctions/feature redundancy using population coding models; and how decisional noise plays a critical role in the reproduction of memory representations.