Short-term visual recall is preserved in aging
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Normal aging brings diminished performance on many cognitive tasks. However, some recent studies suggest that visual short-term recognition memory is preserved (Sekuler et al., 2005). To test the boundaries of such preservation, we exploited direct-matching recall, which is sensitive to subtle imperfections in visual memory (Huang & Sekuler, 2010). In this task, subjects adjust one stimulus to match the remembered characteristics of another. Methods. On each trial, subjects saw two Gabors (each 500 msec) presented in rapid succession. Subjects reproduced the remembered spatial frequency of either the first or the second Gabor. We manipulated the usefulness of attentional selectivity by presenting a cue either before both stimuli (pre-cue) or after (post-cue) in a block design. The cue specified which Gabor, first or second, subjects should match. The presentation of a pre-cue made one upcoming stimulus task-irrelevant, enabling subjects to encode and store only the other stimulus. Subjects were 10 younger (18–24 years, M = 22.1) and 10 older (62–76 years, M = 68.5) adults. Results. (1) Older subjects' accuracy in memory-based matches was equal to that of the younger subjects. (2) The two groups of subjects showed substantial and equal improvement in accuracy when a pre-cue allowed them to selectively attend to just one of the two stimuli. (3) Subjects in both age groups exhibited a Prototype effect: reproduced frequencies were shifted toward the prototypical value of stimuli seen on previous trials. (4) This Prototype effect gained strength when subjects had to encode and remember two, not one stimulus. This last result is consistent with the hypothesis that the Prototype effect reflects an adaptive augmentation of an imprecise memory. Short-term recall is preserved with aging, as are the benefits gained from selective visual attention. Both outcomes suggest the importance of compensatory changes in cortical circuitry (McIntosh et al., 1999).
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".