New preprint with @SamJung @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps.... Here we uncover what might be driving the “meaningfulness benefit” in visual working memory. Studies show that real objects are remembered better in VWM tasks than abstract stimuli. But why? 1/
our manuscript is now published in PLOS Bio!
interestingly, attention didn't change the total size of the space, compared to perceptual judgements we measured without the interleaved attention task, consistent with normalization of the representations. we think this is a cool and novel way to look at the effects of attention - hope you agree!
we measured the local length throughout the orientation space - the distance spanned in windows of the representation - to assess changes induced by attention. lengths were expanded in a narrow window around targets, but compressed in a broad window around distractors.
our participants performed interleaved tasks, where they reported the perceived similarity between orientations under different attention conditions (attending 45° CW or CCW). we fit these responses with models based on MDS, finding that orientation representations were best accounted for in 4-D.
excited to share this new preprint w/ Melissa and @racheldenison.bsky.social
we measured the representational geometry of orientations using behavioral similarity judgements, and found that attention expanded representations around target orientations with a broader compression around distractors
recently posted a new preprint (the first of my postdoc 🎉) where we implemented normalization across space *and* time, allowing us to capture several neural and behavioral findings! I'll be presenting this work at VSS in a couple of months too for those attending
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
