Developing a Method to Measure Dynamic Visual Working Memory

本研究旨在建立一种高效可靠的视觉工作记忆测量方法，并验证其有效性。这个项目的第一部分已经完成，设计并测试了“视觉工作记忆跟踪”范式。这种方法的灵感来自于连续的心理物理学和多目标跟踪，这样参与者就可以看到一系列事件，然后在触摸屏上重现这一序列。通过将刺激作为一系列事件，我们可以在一次试验中收集数百个数据点。重要的是，我们发现新任务不会受到知觉或注意力混淆的影响。正如预期的那样，新方法具有很高的能力，能够在10个参与者和少于10次试验（每个参与者少于15分钟的测试）的情况下测量集大小2和4之间的差异。更重要的是，高功率也允许研究视觉工作记忆资源如何在整个试验中分布。这项研究已在2023年澳大利亚实验心理学会议上发表，并将在2023年视觉科学学会上发表。手稿正在定稿，将于本月内提交给学术期刊。

This research aims to create a efficient yet reliable method to measure visual working memory and establish its validity. The first part of this project is complete, with the "Visual Working Memory Tracking" paradigm designed and tested. This method takes inspiration from continuous psychophysics and multiple object tracking, such that participants view a sequence of events and then reproduce this sequence on a touchscreen. By having the stimulus as a sequence of events, we are then able to collect hundreds of data points across a single trial. Importantly, we find that new task does not suffer from perceptual or attentional confounds.As expected, the new method has a high degree of power, with the ability to measure the difference between set sizes 2 and 4 with 10 participants and less than 10 trials (less than 15 minutes of testing per participant). More importantly, the high degree of power also allows for the study of how visual working memory resources are distributed across the trial.This research has been presented at the Australasian Experimental Psychology Conference 2023, and will also be presented at the Vision Sciences Society 2023. The manuscript is being finalised and will be submitted to an academic journal within the month.