Familiarity and Meaning in Visual Working Memory

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Visual working memory allows people to briefly hold visual information in awareness. Researchers investigating this memory system have found that people are capable of holding in mind very few objects at a time, and that this number is related to many different factors. The current research focuses on how factors such as background knowledge, familiarity and meaning affect visual working memory, as measured by the number of objects that are held. This work is expected to improve our understanding of visual skills such as those involved in driving and other complex tasks that require remembering and monitoring multiple objects. It is also expected that the work will inform the design of artificial displays and user interfaces.The current research aims to broadly understand how the working memory system is affected by background knowledge, familiarity and meaningfulness. In order to isolate the visual working memory system -- and separate it from other memory systems, like long-term memory -- a large amount of research focuses on working memory for simple shapes or colors. Such research allows us to isolate the contributions of visual working memory, but is not indicative of how we use our memory in the real world. This project will focus on understanding both the cognitive and neural mechanisms of visual working memory for meaningful objects more like those we encounter in our everyday life. In particular, we will use both behavioral manipulations designed to isolate working memory and a neural marker of brain activity measured with electroencephalography to track how much is held in visual working memory to measure memory capacity for meaningful objects. We will also employ a cognitive training paradigm designed to improve visual working memory capacity by creating new meaningful connections between objects. Overall, the goal of the research is to better understand how to measure and improve visual working memory for realistic and meaningful objects.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.