RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Visual memories are stored along a compressed timeline
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 101295
DO 10.1101/101295
A1 Inder Singh
A1 Aude Oliva
A1 Marc W. Howard
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/01/18/101295.abstract
AB In continuous recognition the recency effect manifests as a decrease in accuracy and a sublinear increase in response time (RT) with the lag of a repeated stimulus. The recency effect could result from the gradual weakening of mnemonic traces. Alternatively, the recency effect could result from a search through a compressed timeline of recent experience. These two hypotheses make very different predictions about the shape of response time distributions. Using highly-memorable pictures to mitigate changes in accuracy enabled a detailed examination of the effect of recency on retrieval dynamics. The recency at which pictures were repeated ranged over two orders of magnitude across three experiments. Analysis of the RT distributions showed that the time at which memories became accessible changed with the recency of the probe, as predicted by a serial search model suggesting that visual memories can be accessed by sequentially scanning along a compressed representation of the past.