Developing a Method to Measure Dynamic Visual Working Memory

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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.