Visual long-term memory has a massive storage capacity for object details

被引:739
作者
Brady, Timothy F. [1 ]
Konkle, Talia [1 ]
Alvarez, George A. [1 ]
Oliva, Aude [1 ]
机构
[1] MIT, Dept Brain & Cognit Sci, Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
基金
美国国家卫生研究院; 美国国家科学基金会;
关键词
object recognition; gist; fidelity;
D O I
10.1073/pnas.0803390105
中图分类号
O [数理科学和化学]; P [天文学、地球科学]; Q [生物科学]; N [自然科学总论];
学科分类号
07 ; 0710 ; 09 ;
摘要
one of the major lessons of memory research has been that human memory is fallible, imprecise, and subject to interference. Thus, although observers can remember thousands of images, it is widely assumed that these memories lack detail. Contrary to this assumption, here we show that long-term memory is capable of storing a massive number of objects with details from the image. Participants viewed pictures of 2,500 objects over the course of 5.5 h. Afterward, they were shown pairs of images and indicated which of the two they had seen. The previously viewed item could be paired with either an object from a novel category, an object of the same basic-level category, or the same object in a different state or pose. Performance in each of these conditions was remarkably high (92%, 88%, and 87%, respectively), suggesting that participants successfully maintained detailed representations of thousands of images. These results have implications for cognitive models, in which capacity limitations impose a primary computational constraint (e.g., models of object recognition), and pose a challenge to neural models of memory storage and retrieval, which must be able to account for such a large and detailed storage capacity.
引用
收藏
页码:14325 / 14329
页数:5
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