Abstract
Previous studies have shown systematic bias in memory for various visual features. For example, a study on visual working memory for color showed that responses drawn from working memory are significantly biased away from category boundaries and toward category centers (Bae, Olkkonen, Allred, & Flombaum, 2015). Our previous work found that systematic memory bias toward category center also occurs in long-term memory for high-level visual features such as image style (Yu, Takeda, Tsuda, & Saiki, 2020). Here we report our work on short-term memory for image style. We used the style transfer technique (Gatys, Ecker, & Bethge, 2016) to convert scene photos into painting-like scene images. Based on the painting styles of four well-known artworks by Rembrandt, Braque, Monet, and Kandinsky, we created image series (72 image styles for each of 72 scenes) in which the style changes continuously between those prototypical painting styles. Styles that are near the four prototypes are called “prototypical styles”, and styles that are between prototypes are called “mixed styles” (e.g., styles that mix Monet and Kandinsky’s style together). In each trial, participants looked at a painting-like scene image (sample image) for 2 seconds and tried to memorize the style. After a brief interval, an image that contained the same content and different style from the sample image was shown. Participants were asked to adjust the style to reproduce the sample image. Opposite to what we previously found for long-term memory, response frequency data show that more responses were made for mixed-style stimuli compared with near-prototypical stimuli, though all the styles appeared with the same frequency in sample images. Taken together, the results suggest that systematic bias also exists in visual working memory for image style, while the pattern is different from that of long-term memory.