VSTM UPDATING (293832)

  https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/293832

  FP7 (2007-2013)

  Cognitive and Electrophysiological Mechanisms of Visual Short-Term Memory Updating

  Marie-Curie Action: "Career Integration Grants" (FP7-PEOPLE-2011-CIG)

  cognitive psychology

  2011-09-01 Start Date (YY-MM-DD)

  2015-08-31 End Date (YY-MM-DD)

  € 100,000 Total Cost

  Description

Most of our everyday activities require holding visual information in our minds and using it to guide our actions. Visual short-term memory (VSTM) is the system that provides this ability. Importantly, the information in VSTM should be continuously updated, in order to accommodate task-relevant input from the environment and remove irrelevant and outdated information. However, the cognitive and electrophysiological processes that underlie VSTM updating are still unknown. To this end, I have developed an updating version of the standard change detection paradigm that is used in VSTM research. The present proposal aims at using this paradigm to address three objectives. Objective 1: Specifying the behavioral characteristics of VSTM updating. The experiments in this part of the proposal will examine the cognitive processes that enable updating VSTM, namely, entering, changing and removing information. Objective 2: Examining the relationship between updating and the creation of a compound VSTM representation. Previous work and theory suggested that the items maintained in VSTM create a bound, unitary representation that includes the relational associations among them. This finding implies that whenever any of the items in VSTM is updated, the entire compound representation has to be updated or re-created. This part earch will investigate the involvement of VSTM updating in markers for binding among VSTM items. Also, it will examine the role of binding in creating long-term memory representations. Objective 3: Examining the electrophysiological correlates of VSTM updating. Previous work on VSTM used the event-related potential (ERP) methodology to identify a physiological marker for its capacity. This part of the proposal will use this marker to examine the electrophysiological activity that is related to updating VSTM, and in order to reveal the relationship between updating and VSTM capacity.

  Complicit Organisations

1 Israeli organisation participates in VSTM UPDATING.