Evidence for the role of visual short-term memory in conscious object recognition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What happens to a visual stimulus when it reaches the severe bottlenecks inherent to the human information processing system and what are the cognitive resources and neural substrates that limit the amount of information that can be consciously perceived? Previous research has demonstrated that when visual short-term memory (VSTM) resources are fully occupied, there is a decrease in activity in the right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ), which can result in inattentional blindness to suddenly presented stimuli. As the rTPJ has been implicated in visual neglect, we have previously demonstrated that a high VSTM load leads to impaired recognition performance for objects presented in the left visual field, mimicking the processing deficits of neglect patients. In the present study, we used fMRI to examine the neural architecture subserving this effect. In other words, how does VSTM load affect areas that support memory, perception, and attention? Under a low (1 item) or high (3 item) VSTM load, pictures of objects were briefly presented to the left and/or right of fixation during the delay period. Under a low memory load, areas that support the maintenance of items in VSTM (superior IPS, inferior IPS, and ventral occipital areas) showed increased activity to bilaterally presented objects, relative to a single object, indicating that these areas had resources available to process additional information. Under a high memory load, however, activity in these memory regions did not continue to increase, as memory capacity had already been exceeded. Interestingly, when VSTM resources reached capacity, object recognition performance suffered. Strikingly, activity in areas that support VSTM maintenance was a better predictor of object identification performance than activity in the object-sensitive lateral occipital complex (LOC). These behavioral and neuroimaging results demonstrate that the availability of visual short-term memory resources may be critical to the conscious identification of object stimuli.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".